A Baker’s Dozen Years on the Night Shift

Thirteen years of three a.m. starts at the corner bakery.

The alarm goes off at 2.20 a.m. By 2.55, Tomasz Wierzbicki has unlocked the side door of Hartley’s Bakery on the corner of Rope Walk and Quay Street, switched on the deck oven and tied his apron. By the time most of Calder’s old town is waking up, he will have mixed, shaped and baked around 600 loaves, 400 rolls and a tray of the cinnamon buns that regulars queue for on Saturday mornings. He has done this, five or six nights a week, for thirteen years. A baker’s dozen, as his colleagues like to remind him.

An accidental baker

Wierzbicki, now 44, did not set out to bake. He arrived in Calder in his late twenties with a degree in engineering and a job on a construction site that ended when the contractor went bust. A friend told him that Hartley’s was looking for someone to wash trays and sweep floors overnight. He took it for three months, he says, “until something better came along”.

The bakery’s then owner, an elderly man named Reginald Hartley who had run the shop since the 1970s, began teaching him to mix dough on quiet nights. Within a year, Wierzbicki was running the night shift on his own. When Hartley retired and sold the business to his niece, she asked Wierzbicki to stay on as head baker.

“I think I liked it because it was like engineering, but you can eat the results,” he says, laughing. “Temperature, time, weight, water. If the bread is wrong, there is always a reason. You just have to find it before five o’clock.”

The niece, Jennifer Hartley-Moss, who now owns the shop, says she could not run it without him. “People think the bakery is the counter, the smiles in the morning,” she says. “The bakery is actually Tomasz at three a.m. with flour up to his elbows. If he is ill, I am in trouble.”

A night in the kitchen

The work follows a rhythm that has barely changed in thirteen years. Doughs that were mixed the previous afternoon and left to rise slowly in the cold room come out first. While they warm up, Wierzbicki mixes the day’s rolls and the sweet dough for the buns. The deck oven, which holds 48 loaves, is loaded for the first time around 3.45, and then roughly every 40 minutes until 6.30.

There is a radio tuned to a classical station, which he says keeps him calm, and a whiteboard covered in his small, neat handwriting: weights, temperatures, a list of special orders for cafés and restaurants in the old town. At around 4.30, a second baker arrives to help with the shaping. At 6, the counter staff come in and the first deliveries go out in a small electric van.

The night shift is not without cost. Wierzbicki sleeps in two blocks, in the morning after work and for a couple of hours in the early evening. He has missed most of his friends’ birthday dinners and many school plays. His wife, a nurse who works days at the hospital in Harrow, laughs about the fact that they have spent thirteen years passing each other on the stairs.

Thirteen years of change

A lot has changed on the corner of Rope Walk in that time. When he started, the bakery sold mostly white sliced loaves and iced buns. Now about half of its bread is sourdough, and a growing proportion uses heritage flour from the restored mill on the Ardle. Energy costs have more than doubled, and the shop has raised prices three times in the last two years, something he admits he finds uncomfortable.

He has also noticed a change in the customers. The early-morning trade from building workers and dock staff, who used to queue at 6 a.m. for bacon rolls, has dwindled as the harbour has changed. In their place are commuters cycling along the canal, and on weekends, tourists who have read about the cinnamon buns online.

Asked whether he ever thinks about stopping, he shrugs. His knees are not what they were, and there is talk of moving to a 4 a.m. start once a younger baker has been trained. But he says he would miss the quiet. “At four o’clock the whole city is asleep except for me and the foxes,” he says. “Then the bread comes out of the oven and the street smells like it should. Thirteen years and I still like that moment.”