The papers may be full of headlines declaring the demise of traditional high street bakers, greengrocers and ironmongers, but a group of British businessmen are planning to buck the trend by re-launching a historic butchers.
The Brand Cellar, a company created to relaunch some of Britain's best-known names, is planning to bring back Dewhurst, the butcher that pioneered the sale of meat on the high street.
Dewhurst, which was founded by the Vestey family with one shop in Liverpool in 1897, dominated the British butchery industry with 1,400 outlets in 1997 – but collapsed into administration by 2006.
David Birchall, Brand Cellar chief executive, said Dewhurst was one of the best "brands in meat".
Birchall, who was previously chief executive of the now-defunct Kwik Save chain of convenience stores, said starting a new company with "such a historic and well-known brand" would give the business a much greater chance of success than trying to introduce a new brand.
"A lot of us know trying to start a new business from scratch has a large failure rate," Birchall said. "[With Dewhurst] we are able to take a brand with real provenance and a real history [back] to the market. There is a huge recognition and love of Dewhurst [among consumers]."
The Brand Cellar, which was founded by a trio of leading advertising and marketing executives with financial backing from some of Britain's best known businessmen, declined to state how much it paid for the Dewhurst brand or detail its exact plans for the business.
YouGov research, commissioned by the Brand Cellar, put Dewhurst as the third most missed retailer among those that have closed over the past 10 years.
Dewhurst is one of 11 brands the company has acquired since the firm's founders hit upon the idea of buying up dormant names in 2009. Jonathan Hick, the company's vice president who wrote the first draft of the Brand Cellar's business plan on the tablecloth of a French restaurant in Leeds, said the firm expects three of its brands to turnover more than £100m a year each within three years.
Its other brands include Zorbit, the pioneer of terry-towelling nappies, Conway Stewart, a 106-year-old pen company that once counted Winston Churchill among its customers, and Glen Rossie, a 198-year-old scotch whisky. The company has signed up Status Quo front-man Francis Rossi to lead the brand's introduction to the fast-growing luxury whisky market in China and India.
Andrew Harrison, the firm's global brands director, said: "Why fight for 8 million whisky drinkers in the UK, when there are 300m in India."
Harrison said the beauty of the company was that it had only has five full-time staff and was able to outsource most of the brand development and market research to other companies. "We make nothing, we stock nothing, we sell nothing and we've got hardly any staff," he said.