A new London-inspired café is getting ready to open its doors in West Cumbria.
Emma’s Bakes has set up shop in Egremont and will open on Monday July 31.
Owners Emma, 31, and her husband Chris Scurr, 39, of Egremont said they had been inspired by independent cafes in London when designing the new eatery.
Emma said: “We’re really excited, it’ll be nice to see people enjoy our stuff instead of just taking it away. We’re also nervous but it’s not a bad feeling, we just want to get it right!
“Me and Chris regularly go to London and there’s a lot of cafés down there that have flowers and are pink and I’m always attracted to those places – it’s also my favourite colour.
“I just wanted to bring something a bit different to the town.”
The pair first set up the business during the first COVID-19 lockdown.
Emma said: “We were like two months into lockdown and I was bored, so we started making cakes for friends and donating them to hospital and stuff like that.
“Then someone said we should sell them because they thought they were really good, and we had someone ask for pies and it just escalated from there.”
Chris looks after the savoury side of the business while Emma focuses on the sweet.
She added: “We initially had our first year in my mum’s kitchen in Bigrigg but it just absolutely escalated, and we started doing outside catering and supplying shops.”
The bakes proved such a hit that the duo ended up quitting their day jobs to focus on building the business.
They now supply 11 local shops in the area with cakes and eventually ended up converting Chris’ dad’s garage into a large kitchen space in Thornhill to sell their bakes from.
Emma said: “We open twice a week and we have a queue down the road, but because we’re so out of the way we felt we had to do something to make it more accessible to people.
“I think the whole lockdown thing of wanting to order things is wearing off now and people just want to walk up and get what they want.”
Emma added that they planned to buy a shop after getting married in May this year, but two weeks before their wedding, they spotted that the former bridal shop in Egremont had become available.
The space has now been fully renovated and Emma said they plan to add more floors to the café for extra seating, parties and meetings in the future.
She said: “With the shop I wanted to make the layout inside a big, long bar where you have to sit next to people and naturally chat.
“I just want to bring a bit of community back to the town, I fell like that’s been lost so much through COVID.
“I think we do have a lot of people who come to us in Thornhill who don’t see anybody in a day and it’s nice that they can now come and sit and have a coffee with us.
“There’s so many lonely people out there, if they can come in and know there’s someone else to talk to then why not do that”
The space also has a snug area and more private tables as well as a children’s play corner.
Emma added: “I want people to be able to sit and have a good crack. Every person that passes the shop at the moment pops their head in to ask when we’re open.
“It’s amazing how many people have asked us when we’re opening! The standing joke is they’ll be queues down to the bottom of the street but that’s now making me nervous!”
Despite the businesses success, Emma said she had never planned to end up in baking.
She said: “Everyone laughs that I do this because I can’t actually cook. I’m the fussiest eater in the world, I can’t put a meal together, but I just happen to know how to bake.
“We don’t really know how it happened, everyone finds it really funny that I can get up in a morning and do this because I’m also the worst person at getting up in a morning.
“Even my mum and dad have said they can’t believe we’ve kept it going.”
“I’ve had people from Dearham and Seascale and every in between say they want to come, so we’re hoping we bring a lot of people to Egremont from other towns.
“I have so many people from Workington and Distington saying they can’t wait for us to open – it’s nice to hear people are travelling to Egremont for a change because I feel that doesn’t happen anymore.”
