Single Step

Lancaster's wholefood shop has been a workers' co-operative since 1976 — currently six members, all equal, nobody's boss — and began life as a radical bookshop on King Street before settling into a former wallpaper warehouse on Penny Street, where the bulk bins and refill lines now do the politics by other means. Fifty years of collective grocering is not a nostalgia act; it is a business model that has outlived most of its critics, and the shop keeps plain six-day hours to prove it.