Osborne Bros

Thomas George Osborne started selling cockles off Cockle Shed Row in 1880, and the fifth generation runs the wharf today — cousins Graham Osborne and Andrew Lawrence, the two family lines braided together since Cyril and Florence's day. The seafood hall does the retail trade off the boats, and the café — an eighteenth-century stable mews opposite the Crooked Billet — serves it with bread and vinegar to the Old Leigh crowd; the Sunday Times has ranked it among the country's best beach cafés, and the hygiene inspectors marked everything very good in March 2025. A hundred and forty-odd years of one family shelling the estuary: Old Leigh's economy, in miniature and in fact.