Paula Watson has just enjoyed the last of the warm weather, travelling up to the north of Scotland in a campervan with husband Tony and their two Airedale terriers, Ren and Pip. As the owner of busy local bakery chain Pure Knead, the open road suited her as a holiday choice. “I am not a sitter, I like to be on the move,” she says. “I wake up thinking bakery, and I go to bed thinking bakery, so when we do go away I end up wondering what to do!”
Paula, 58, talks to Appetite from her Whitley Bay shop, where sourdough loaves are stacked in the window alongside golden croissants, fluffy frangipane tarts and alluring lemon loaves topped with rosemary. Preparations for the festive season are underway, Paula explains: “I’ve had my holiday, so that’s usually the time to start the Christmas prep.” They begin by making the jams, using aromatics like lavender and bay leaves, before starting on what Paula calls ‘The Great Mincemeat Haul’ because it’s all made in-house to fill the mince pies. “Of course, the Christmas cakes need time to get plenty of brandy and rum in them too. They’re basically fruit held together by alcohol!” she laughs. In the run-up to Christmas the Pure Knead bakers will also be making their signature custard tart with an eggnog twist, and stollen bites which they have affectionately named ‘knee trembles’.
For Paula, the act of baking luxury products without ultra-processed ingredients is a personal crusade, hence the name Pure Knead. The cakes and bakes are made with simple, high-quality ingredients and topped with candied fruits, herbs and edible flowers. “I’ve suffered from allergies and eczema all my life, so I’ve always been extremely careful with my diet. If I won’t eat it, then I don’t expect other people to eat it either. That’s where the whole idea of decorating with more natural products comes in, why put all that care and effort into a recipe just to top it with a load of artificial stuff?”
Paula’s baking was inspired by an Australian cookbook called The Cook and Baker, published in 2015 by Cherie Bevan and Tass Tauroa. “Reading that book blew my mind because it was just really clean baking,” she explains. “In the UK we had very much gone down the line of putting improvers and chemicals and colourings into baking, so for me it was a huge thing to hear about these bakeries in Australia that were just using pure ingredients. They were going back to old skill sets and modernising them.”
Paula’s background is in business, not baking, although with a degree in fine art it could be argued that the creative streak was always there. After university she moved to Oxford and worked for a small company organising classical music events. “That’s where I got my business knowledge really because you weren’t restricted to just doing one job,” she explains. “One day, you’d be sorting a box office out, and the next day you’d be putting up a marquee. I really got a taste for working in a small team and saw what you can achieve when things just click.”
Originally from Darlington, Paula has always loved Newcastle and in 1997 convinced husband Terry that they should move back nearer to the Toon. After a stint working for Barclays Bank, which she admits she hated, Paula took some time out from work to raise her two sons, Dan, now 26, and Tom, 24. As they grew up, she worked a few part-time jobs, with one she particularly enjoyed being at the Artisan Baker in Whitley Bay. In 2016, when the boys were teenagers, she finally decided to take the plunge and set up her original market stall at Tynemouth market, selling cakes, pastries and pies, all made from scratch with minimally processed ingredients.
The stall proved to be a hit, and a few months later, she used the money she’d made to move the business into its first bricks and mortar shop on Park View in Whitley Bay, close to her home. It was at this original location, with staff members Robynne and Ash, that they decided to start baking their own sourdough bread alongside all the regular cakes and pastries. Paula says it was the 3am starts that put her off making bread at the beginning, but Ash embraced the challenge and the bread side of the business has since gone from strength to strength.
Ten years on, she now has shops in Newcastle’s Dean Street and Gosforth Central Arcade, as well as a production unit in Byker. When asked if she always had a grand plan, Paula laughs: “I liken it to a horse bolting out of the field, all you can do is stay on. Sometimes I don’t really feel I’ve made any decisions per se, things have just presented themselves to us and we’ve taken the opportunity, you know, we’ve been really lucky.”
Despite citing an element of good fortune, Paula admits she is a meticulous planner when it comes to the business. “Part of having your own business is being able to recognise what’s a good opportunity and what’s not, because it’s so easy to get yourself landed into a position where you’re in a shop that’s got no footfall and it’s so expensive. Before you know it, just for that one wrong move, you can lose the whole lot.” She describes the recent opening of their Gosforth shop as something of a ‘military manoeuvre’. “You can’t sit paying rent on an empty shop. You’ve got to be in there and sort it. I think in Gosforth we got the keys and we were in there within five weeks.”
She has a great team around her and particularly loves seeing the students who work in the shops go off to travel or start their dream jobs. She’s not in the kitchen all the time now but still works a six-day week and spends a lot of time at the production unit and between the three shops. “I’m a firm believer that as soon as you take your finger off the pulse, things start to go wrong,” she says. She’s still the one who sifts through cookery books for new ideas but says: “If the guys in the bakery want to try something, they’ll try it.”
Having started the business at the age of 48, Paula admits she has no idea when she might retire, but taking the plunge later in life has given her some advantages. “I think having kids just changes your whole outlook on life,” she muses. “You might have been a bit of a mouse before, but you learn so much having them because you don’t let anybody mess with you or your children, you become this absolute lioness, I think.”
She believes that the life experience and perspective she has now make running the business easier than it would have been in her 20s and wants to encourage other women who may have a business idea but feel like it’s too late to change career. “I think there’s very much an attitude of once lasses get to a certain age, we’re surplus to requirements. But in fact, we’re like a good wine, we mature with age. Now I think you can do anything if you want it enough, and I think more women should just go for it.”
Her son Tom now helps with the business accounts, while son Dan and husband Tony both help with the weekend deliveries. She believes it gave them a great insight at a young age into what goes into the day-to-day running of a business. “At 14 and 16 they were learning what VAT is, how to do a tax return, what’s involved in ingredients and costings, and I think it’s been really good for them.”
She believes that good baking is a core element of life in the North East, particularly the tradition of pastry and pies, and is happy to have developed that heritage into a thriving local enterprise. She remembers: “When I was a kid in Darlington, people like me didn’t have careers, it was doctors and lawyers, they had careers. The rest of us just had a job.” It’s apparent that this particular Darlo lass has created far more than just a job for herself – Pure Knead is a legacy that the people of the North East will savour for years to come. Paula sums it up by saying: “When you’re from the North East it’s in your DNA. It’s in our gene code; there’s a little extra bit on the end that says pastry.”
Pure Knead is open Tuesday to Sunday at 38 Dean Street, Newcastle; Central Shopping Centre, Gosforth and 111 Park View, Whitley Bay. You can also find Pure Knead at Common Ground at the Beacon Centre, North Shields. www.pure-knead.co.uk
