A small black coin, stamped with a castle, sold in nearly every corner shop in Britain for over two centuries. Almost nobody who eats one knows the town it’s named after once ran 13 factories built entirely around it.
Pontefract cakes are one of those foods everyone recognises, and almost nobody can place. The coin shape, the castle stamped into the top, the specific liquorice taste that’s slightly softer and sweeter than a stick of raw root. What most people don’t know is that the name isn’t decorative. Pontefract is a real West Yorkshire town, and for the best part of 300 years it was, quite literally, the liquorice capital of the world.
That history is mostly gone now. The factories have closed, the fields either side of Micklegate where the plant once grew are built over, and the last hand-stamping “thumpers” stopped being used in the 1960s. What’s left is a town that still marks the trade every July, and a sweet that carries a castle on its face without most of the people eating it ever wondering why.
Region: West Yorkshire, the town of Pontefract, between Wakefield and Castleford
Best for: food history, a genuinely unusual half-day out, timing a visit around the July Liquorice Festival
Getting there: Pontefract Monkhill and Pontefract Tanshelf stations both connect to Leeds and Wakefield; the town centre is a short walk from either
Time needed: two to three hours for the town centre and castle grounds, a full day if visiting during the Liquorice Festival
Pontefract Cakes: The Coin-Shaped Sweet With a Castle Stamped Into It
The shape isn’t an accident, and it isn’t branding in the modern sense either. Pontefract cakes have been made as small, flat discs since at least the 17th century, originally because that shape was practical for a hand-pressed medicinal lozenge, and the castle stamp was a mark of provenance, proof that the sweet had genuinely come from Pontefract rather than being an imitation made elsewhere. Liquorice production had spread to other English towns by the 19th century, and the castle stamp was Pontefract’s way of saying this one is the real thing.
That distinction mattered more than it sounds. Liquorice was, for most of its history in England, sold as medicine rather than confectionery, marketed for sore throats and coughs long before anyone was eating it purely for pleasure. The shift from remedy to sweet happened gradually, and the castle stamp survived the transition, carried straight through from apothecary shelf to corner shop jar.
From Monks to Medicine: How Liquorice Reached Pontefract
The origin story has more than one version, and it’s worth being honest that none of them can be nailed down with total certainty. One account credits Crusaders returning from the Holy Land around 1090 with bringing the plant back to England. A separate, and more commonly repeated, version credits Dominican monks who settled at Pontefract Priory in the 14th century with cultivating it deliberately, using the town’s mineral-rich soil, thought to be shaped by the presence of the nearby castle’s original quarrying, to grow the root at a scale nowhere else in England managed.
What’s better documented is what happened next. By 1648, liquorice was being grown commercially in garths, small enclosed garden plots, on either side of Micklegate, the street running between Pontefract Castle and the town’s Market Place. By 1614, growers and apothecaries were already forming liquorice extract into small lozenges rather than selling it as raw root, which means the basic shape of a Pontefract cake predates the sweet as most people would recognise it today by well over a century.
George Dunhill and the Sugar That Changed Everything
The liquorice lozenge of the 1600s was medicine first. What turned it into a sweet was a local apothecary named George Dunhill, who around 1750 made a decision that seems almost too simple to have changed an entire town’s economy: he added sugar to the liquorice extract. The result was less bitter, more moreish, and immediately more popular than the medicinal version it replaced. The sweet that emerged from Dunhill’s recipe became known as the Pomfret Cake, using the old name for Pontefract, and later simply the Pontefract Cake.
Dunhill’s timing mattered. English sugar was becoming cheaper and more widely available through the 18th century, and a market that had previously bought liquorice reluctantly, as medicine, suddenly had a reason to buy it for pleasure instead. Pontefract’s existing liquorice-growing infrastructure, already established through more than a century of garth cultivation, meant the town was positioned to scale up production faster than anywhere else trying to catch the same trend.
Thirteen Factories: Pontefract’s Liquorice Boom
By the early 20th century, the numbers had become genuinely remarkable for a town of Pontefract’s size. Around 13 separate liquorice factories were operating within the town at the trade’s peak, employing a significant share of the local workforce and shipping Pontefract cakes across Britain and, eventually, well beyond it. This wasn’t a cottage industry making a niche regional treat. It was a serious manufacturing trade, concentrated almost entirely in one town, built on a plant that grows better here than in most of the rest of the country.
The scale is easy to miss now precisely because so little of it survived into the present. Where Wakefield’s rhubarb trade still has working forcing sheds and a handful of family growers carrying the tradition forward, Pontefract’s liquorice industry didn’t survive the same way. Changing tastes, cheaper synthetic alternatives, and the broader decline of small-town British manufacturing through the 20th century closed the factories one by one, until the industrial side of the story had mostly ended by the century’s later decades.
The Thumper: How Pontefract Cakes Were Actually Made
For most of the trade’s history, the castle stamp wasn’t printed or moulded in the way a modern sweet might be. It was pressed by hand using a tool known locally as a thumper, essentially a weighted die that a factory worker would strike down onto each individual disc of liquorice paste, leaving the castle image embossed into the surface one cake at a time. It’s a detail that sounds almost implausibly slow for an industry producing sweets at national scale, and it was. Hand-stamping with a thumper continued in Pontefract’s factories until as recently as the 1960s, well within living memory for some residents, before mechanised stamping finally took over.
That detail is worth sitting with. A sweet sold in newsagents across the entire country, recognisable by a stamped castle on its face, was for most of its commercial life being finished by an actual person striking a die by hand, thousands of times a day, in a factory a few streets from where the plant itself had been grown for 300 years.
Is Pontefract Still a Liquorice Town Today?
Not in the way it once was. The factories that defined the trade through the 19th and much of the 20th century are gone, and liquorice is no longer grown commercially on any scale in the garths off Micklegate. What survives is memory, civic pride, and one week a year when the town deliberately puts the trade back on display.
This is worth being direct about rather than romanticising. Pontefract today is a working West Yorkshire market town first and a liquorice heritage site second. The industry that gave the town its most famous export has mostly moved on, in the same way Wakefield’s rhubarb forcing sheds have shrunk from over 200 growers to around ten. What Pontefract has held onto is the story, the castle-stamped cake still sold in shops nationally under various brand names, and a festival that keeps the connection between town and sweet from disappearing entirely.
Visiting: The Liquorice Festival and Where to Buy the Real Thing
Pontefract holds a free Liquorice Festival in the town centre every July, built around a parade at Cornmarket alongside stalls, demonstrations and food and drink themed around the trade that built the town. It’s the clearest way to actually experience the connection between Pontefract and its most famous export in person, rather than just reading about a history that’s otherwise mostly disappeared from the streets themselves.
Pontefract Castle is worth combining with a festival visit or a standalone trip. The castle grounds, a short walk from the town centre, give context for the Micklegate garths that once grew the liquorice crop just below the castle walls, and the ruins themselves carry their own separate history worth an hour or two.
Where to Stay: Wentbridge House Hotel, on the Great North Road just outside Pontefract, occupies a building dating to around 1700 and has operated as a hotel since the 1960s, the same decade Pontefract’s last thumpers went out of use.
Practical Tips
- Visit in July if timing a trip around the Liquorice Festival matters to you; the exact date moves year to year and is confirmed closer to the time.
- Combine the town centre with Pontefract Castle, a short walk away, for the fuller picture of where the original liquorice garths sat relative to the castle grounds.
- Pontefract Monkhill and Pontefract Tanshelf stations both run regular services to Leeds and Wakefield; either works as a base for the day.
- Buy Pontefract cakes from a town centre shop rather than assuming any supermarket bag labelled “liquorice” is carrying the genuine article; brand and provenance vary.
- Use the AllTrails app if extending a visit into a walk around the wider Pontefract area; it’s useful for routes beyond the town centre itself.
- Check the current Liquorice Festival date on Wakefield Council’s or the town’s own event listings before travelling specifically for it.
Responsible Visiting
Pontefract is a working town, not a heritage attraction built for visitors. The castle grounds and town centre shops welcome visitors happily, particularly during the Festival, but treat it as you would any other market town: buy from local shops rather than treating a visit as sightseeing only, and be mindful that Micklegate and the surrounding streets are residential as much as historic.
Reader Q&A
Are Pontefract cakes still made in Pontefract? Not at industrial scale. The 13 factories that once defined the trade have closed, and the sweet is now produced by larger confectionery manufacturers elsewhere in Britain, though it still carries the Pontefract name and castle stamp.
What does a Pontefract cake actually taste like? Softer and sweeter than a raw liquorice root or stick, closer to a chewy sweet than a medicinal lozenge, which is exactly the shift George Dunhill’s added sugar was responsible for around 1750.
Why is there a castle on Pontefract cakes? The stamp marked provenance, proving the sweet had genuinely come from Pontefract once other English towns began producing their own liquorice sweets in the 19th century, rather than being a purely decorative flourish.
When is the Pontefract Liquorice Festival? It runs each July annually in Pontefract town centre, free to attend, with a parade at Cornmarket and stalls celebrating the trade; exact dates are confirmed closer to the event each year.
Is liquorice still grown in Pontefract? No, not commercially. The garths either side of Micklegate that once supplied the trade have long since been built over, and the plant is no longer cultivated in the town at any meaningful scale.
A castle stamped into a two-inch disc of liquorice paste, made by hand until the 1960s, sold in newsagents from Cornwall to Aberdeen. Most people who’ve eaten one have no idea the town on the label is real, or that it once ran an entire economy on a plant most of Britain has never seen growing.
Read more about the Rhubarb Triangle a few miles down the road in Wakefield, the black dog folklore still told across the Yorkshire Dales, or browse our full Food category for more of Yorkshire’s overlooked producers.
