This is The Guardian.

The Guardian Archive Long Read.

Hi, my name is Tom Lamont. I'm a writer. And in 2020, I published a Guardian Long

Read called The Butcher's Shop that's lasted 300 years, give or take. Like so many of my

best ideas, my best stories, I came to this via local journalism via a tiny story in a Yorkshire paper.

They wrote about the end of a long generation of butchers in a village called Dronfield in Derbyshire, on the Derbyshire, South Yorkshire border.

And this shop, this tiny, this rickety street-facing meat shop, had been in the Fisher family

year after year after year.

And the present, Mr. Fisher--Frank was well beyond anyone's sort of

normal retirement age. He was in his 80s. He was ready to give up, had been for a while. But unlike

the Mr. Fisher's before him, he had no kids. He had no family to pass the business onto. And the reason he had

agreed to give an interview to the local paper was he was kind of casting around for maybe for a future

air, someone to take on the business. And I went up to meet him. And actually, having gone up to

Johnfield and spent time with Frank,

I realized the story was a bit sadder, even a bit darker than I initially realized

from reading the short piece of local journalism.

And I spent time with Frank.

I just hung around.

I got to know him well.

I think initially I thought I might try to write

some sort of longer piece, some sort of book maybe, or about Frank's life in and around this

butcher shop, because he's had a pretty interesting life. He'd met Picasso as a young man and he'd

...