The Yorkshire baker, famous for her award winning Yorkshire Parkin, is supporting the world’s greatest cycle race with a new range of mugs and prints featuring images by the Lowry-esque artist, Kevin Haynes.
Lottie Shaw commissioned Saddleworth based Kevin Haynes because she loved his industrial paintings featuring portraits of a bygone world. After 18 months of collaboration, the end result is a unique painting entitled ‘On Your Bike’, featuring a bike race speeding through an industrial cotton mill town, with working class onlookers standing in front of a Lottie Shaws’ bakery front.
The men are dressed in typical Yorkshire flat caps and the women wear head scarves and tea pinnies. Lottie is delighted with the piece.
“When our family first started baking in Yorkshire the mill workers would visit our shops every day to buy their hand baked goods.” says Lottie, whose family Yorkshire Parkin recipe is more than a hundred years old. “We linked up with local artist Kevin Haynes because he portrays northern industry in such a wonderful way which we feel is relevant to our brand and heritage.”
Indeed some historians suggest that Parkin was most likely created during the Industrial Revolution when oats and treacle were important elements to the working class diet.
However there are regional differences and this almost sparked a new War of the Roses between Lottie the Yorkshire Baker and Kevin the artist son of a Lancashire Baker! Lottie had her work cut out convincing Kevin, but in the end even he described her sticky, oaty tea time treat as “outstanding”.
The artist Kevin Hayne’s work is often likened to that of LS Lowry with his cotton mills, terraced houses and smoking chimneys, but 65 year old Kevin insists he didn’t set out to copy the Salford artist. Where Lowry often included cyclists in his portraits, for Kevin this is a first.
“I’ve not drawn people cycling before but since ‘On Your Bike’ I’ve done another and it sold straight away so cyclists are evidently very much flavour of the month.”
Lottie hopes that tea and coffee lovers from around the world who come to watch the Grand Depart will leave clutching a Lottie Shaw’s mug and one of the 50 limited edition prints. As for all those cycling enthusiasts who arrive on bikes, they get a small piece of artwork for the price of a piece of Yorkshire Parkin when they buy one of her award winning cakes wrapped in Kevin Hayne’s exclusive print.