MFB Fruits

A proper high street greengrocers, the like of which you rarely see these days. Big supermarkets have a stranglehold on producers and consumers alike, and places like this are slowly being forced to the wall, which is another reason to give MFB Fruits your money.
They carry a great selection of fruits that are always fresh and tasty and competitive in terms of the other outlets in the area (the fruit in the nearby Co-​Op is rubbish and pricey by comparison). As a fairly keen gardener I always have a look at their display of plants out on the street, too. There you can get a good selection of bedding plants, shrubs and the like for reasonable price.

There’s nothing more appealing than piles of brightly coloured, fresh-​looking, home-​grown fruit to cheer you up from the miserable British ‘summer’ weather.
I say ‘home-​grown’ — in fact, as I looked round their produce I’m not sure I discovered anything that was actually grown in the UK — which is a bit depressing. Do we really not produce anything any more? Why do we need to fly apples in from flipping New Zealand?! Anyway, this is not the fault of MFB Fruits, who are simply stocking it, so I shall talk about them and take my producer-​consumer rants elsewhere.
As I said, I find shops that sell fresh groceries super-​appealing. I’m not sure why — maybe they make me think I am skipping through fields, plucking juicy strawberries at my whim, rather than skulking up and down the aisles of a a supermarket, where everything is wrapped in plastic. Either way, this is a great greengrocers: all the fruit & veg looks (and tastes, I can tell you) really fresh and lovely (despite the fact that it has obviously travelled some way to be here…). The shop itself is really clean as well — which is reassuring for a grocers. There’s nothing worse than a grubby, mouldy grocers.
I bought a bag of apples, a bag of apricots and a bag of plums which cost me a princely £3.50, which I thought was great — considering how expensive fruit can be in supermarkets. I can also tell you that they are all delicious — I nearly polished off the apricots in one fell swoop.