The installation ‘Berwick Cockles’ display was co-created with Border Links and with the help of Cameron Robertson, and facilitated by the fantastic Berwick Barracks team.
The Audio Description is available below.
Transcript:
The Cockle maker’s apprentice
The Berwick Cockle maker is retiring and handing over his business to you – his new apprentice.
Follow the steps to discover how these famous sweets were made.
This display and the audio you’re listening to now have been created with local group Border Links, who looked at, touched, listened to and smelled the real objects that inspired this display. You can see some of the real objects in the case next to this display.
The first step in making cockles is tipping 15 kilograms of white sugar into a pan.
There’s a canister on the left side of the display that you can turn to hear the sugar fall into the pan below.
The pan’s humongous, like a big bucket.
It’s made of metal, and it’s very heavy.
It has handles on the sides – but you need to have had your Weetabix or your bran flakes if you want to lift it, especially with all the sugar in!
The pan is lots of different types of brown, with some darker bits, and little spots of green. It’s made of copper.
There are rings on the inside, so you can tell it’s been used.
It smells a bit like burnt toast, or even petrol, and if you speak into it, you can hear your voice echo.
It remind us of a witches’ pot where they make their spells, and makes one member of our group think of her cousin – he had a pan like this that he put on the fire and cooked meat in. It smelled lovely!
To the right of the mixing pot is step 2. If you put your nose to the canister, you can smell the sugar as it melts into caramel in the pot.
Further to the right is step 3. Here is another canister where you can smell the peppermint that was added to the caramel.
We don’t know how much peppermint went in. This was part of a secret family recipe.
The smell of peppermint reminds us of peppermint creams, and makes us hungry!
It reminds us of lilac, fresh air and the seaside, and makes our noses feel clear.
To the right again is Step 4. Here the hot peppermint caramel mixture is stretched over a big hook to make it soft and white.
This reminds us of Captain Hook, or a giant’s coat hook!
It’s made of cold metal, and it’s very tough, which it had to be to be used for so many years.
You wouldn’t like to accidentally walk into it!
It’s quite worn down, like it’s been used a lot, and the hook is fastened to a heavy piece of wood.
The wood is very holey, and the marks and holes look like freckles or insects.
Maybe they were caused by the hot caramel mixture?
It smells a bit like the rust of boats, scrapyards or old cars.
There’s some writing on the wood, but it’s hard to read – it looks like ‘Photos were taken to keep, Thursday 8 July 1995?’
On the back you’ve got some fastenings so that you can fasten it to the wall with screws.
If you’re going to be pulling the caramel on it, you’ve going to have to fasten it tightly to the wall.
In the display there is a hook, with some pretend peppermint caramel. Try pulling it over the hook. Can you feel the resistance as you pull?
Once the warm caramel mixture had been pulled, it needed to be rolled through a machine to shape it into sweets. This is step 5.
This is a machine made of metal, and it’s very heavy.
There are two cylinders that remind us of hair rollers, and gears, almost like on a bike.
The only part that’s wooden is the handle, which we think is to help you grip.
You wind it clockwise – but you’d have to watch your fingers, you wouldn’t want to get them caught!
To the left but a little higher in the display, you can turn the handle of the drop roller, to shape the mixture into cockles.
It’s like a pasta maker, but the shape of the handle reminds us of a cat’s tail, and it makes a clunking noise as the gears turn.
It’s stiff to turn, and it’s quite tiring – you’ve got to have muscles! Maybe it needs a bit of WD40, or some oil like the tin man from the Wizard of Oz!
To the left and a little higher again, you can feel shapes like the ones on the rollers.
They’re almost like inside-out bubbles in the bath.
These shapes turn the caramel into a sheet of round sweets.
When the sheet is given a good whack, it shatters into individual Berwick Cockles, ready to be packed into sweet tins.
These tins are cylinders made of metal, and when you tap them they sound hollow.
The labels are green and red, with white writing that is old fashioned and very fancy.
They have a Princess’s name on and the address of the shop, but no list of ingredients like you’d get today.
The tins are very light without sweets in, and even though there is some rust on the tins, the inside is shiny like a mirror.
Once the tins were filled with cockles, they were ready to be sold in Cowes Cockle shop!
Transcript: A Trip to the sweet shop
Locals will tell you that the Berwick Cockles sold today aren’t quite the same as they used to be.
But until 2003, a visit to Cowes Cockle shop to buy the original was the ultimate treat.
This display and the audio you’re listening to now have been created with local group Border Links, who looked at, touched, listened to and smelled the real objects that inspired this display.
On the left of the display you can ring a bell…When you opened the door to step into the cockle shop a similar bell would have rung. If the staff were in the back room, that bell would have let them know you had arrived.
Stepping inside the shop, people remember it as smelling musty, and it felt very dark, especially because the floor and shop fittings that covered the walls were made of dark wood. There was a long wooden counter, which the shopkeeper, wearing an apron, stood behind.
The shop didn’t just sell Berwick Cockles. Those dark wooden shelves were full of jars of things to buy, including lots of different types of sweets.
On the right of this display is a shelf. On the right-hand side of this you can put your nose to three canisters to smell some of the sweets that you would have found in the shop – do those smells remind you of anything? One of the jars contains the smell of Berwick Cockles, one of pear drops and one of liquorice.
Inside the shop, once you’d chosen what sweets you wanted to buy, the shop keeper would take the big jar off the shelf and pour them onto the scales. People bought sweets based on their weight. Often, people would ask for a quarter – this meant 4 ounces of sweets, or a quarter of a pound. That’s about 113 grams.
The sweets were weighed on old-fashioned metal weighing scales. You would put your weight on one side and then you would carefully tip the sweets on the other side until the different sides of the scale were exactly level with each other.
As a child, you might watch those sweets pouring into the scale, perhaps hoping the sweet shop owner might tip just one extra sweet in. Once your sweets were weighed, the shop keeper would pick up one of the paper bags, which were kept on the big shelves behind the counter, and pour your sweets in! You would hand over the money for the sweets, and they were yours!
On the left of the shelf, you can try weighing out a quarter. Put your sweet bag on one side of the scale, and different weights on the other, to see which weight balances the scales.
Intervention Design and Project Management: Barker Langham
Build: Reeves and Bond
Scent Development/Consultation: AVM Curiosities