As Sayers shuts shops, Liverpool’s best bread comes from one-shop bakers

Pastille Bakery built its name on cruffins, and its shop shuts at 3.30pm or whenever the counter is empty. On 5 September it opened a second shop, on Bridgewater Street in the Baltic Triangle. By 10 September the company behind Sayers the Bakers, founded in a basement kitchen in Old Swan in 1912, had closed around 19 branches it called “no longer commercially viable”, and more than 30 Sayers and Poundbakery shops were listed online as permanently closed.

Those two stories are the same story. The bread and pastry Liverpool talks about, and the bakeries national judges are naming, now come from places with one or two shops and an owner behind the counter.

The prizes

Look at this year’s honours. The Good Food Guide’s Britain’s Best Bakeries 2026 named two Liverpool shops: Pastille, for danishes and cruffins in flavours from Black Forest gâteau to tiramisu, and The Wild Loaf, whose cinnamon buns and sourdough cheese toastie the guide singled out. In May, Bean There, the café and bakehouse on the corner of Smithdown Road and Penny Lane, won gold for plain sourdough at Britain’s Best Loaf; only two other bakeries in Britain took gold in that class. Its head of bread, Sebastian Zimmer-Lachman, had won bronze the year before for a black sesame sourdough. Candice and Andrew Mulligan opened it in 2017, and the gold-medal loaf is on sale there and at their bakery on Rose Lane.

Pastille’s story is the fast version. Jamie Heffey started in his home kitchen, sold out at markets and pop-ups, and opened the Gibraltar Row shop in 2024; it was on the national list in under two years. “I learned to cook, spent the next 10 years burning out as a chef … drove taxis to pay the bills,” he told the Echo when the list came out.

The old guard is small too

It would be easy to make this about sourdough and social media, but the Echo’s readers didn’t. Asked in September for Merseyside’s best bakery, they put Pastille and Bean There joint third and gave first place to Phil Manion’s on Hale Road in Walton, a shop that holds eight to ten customers, has no flashy social media, and sells bread, cream buns, sausage rolls and pies to a queue that comes from as far as Speke and Huyton. It once had five shops and shrank back to the original one in its founder’s lifetime. Derek Ford and David Brook took it over last year; Sue, who manages it, has worked there 27 years. Everything is made on the premises each day.

That is the point. The bakery that wins in Liverpool is the one where the baking happens behind the counter, whether the product is a sausage roll or a tiramisu cruffin. Sayers, with almost 40 shops and around 800 staff before the cuts, was the opposite model, and it is the one shrinking.

And the coffee

The same pattern holds for coffee, though with less evidence. In August a Capital on Tap ranking of the UK’s best independent coffee shops picked two Liverpool names: Rough Hand Made, the bakery-café on the Royal Albert Dock where the pastries go early; and COFFI on Pilgrim Street, which Michael Davis and Natalie Southern opened in 2021 to sell only coffee traceable to the farm.

Where to start

Pastille opens Wednesday to Sunday from 9.30am; go early. Buy the gold-medal sourdough at Bean There on Penny Lane. Then take the bus north to Walton for a sausage roll from the shop the Echo’s readers voted Merseyside’s best.

Checked October 2026.