Morpeth Bakehouse Restaurant

When Allison and Stephen Arnott first visited Morpeth near the Hunter Valley seven years ago, they were overcome by a sense of destiny.
“We were living in Glebe at the time and had just had our first child,” says Allison.
“One weekend we took a short break to Morpeth to find out more about where Stephen’s family had come from.”
They were charmed by its quaint old-fashioned weatherboard cottages, quiet wide  streets, rattly wooden bridge and historic sandstone buildings.
“I just fell in love with it and didn’t want to leave,” says Allison. “I was so taken by the old Arnott’s bakehouse, the former home and bakery of the Arnott family in the 1860s, that I asked Steve to find out if the owner wanted to sell.”
As luck would have it, the owner was just about to put it on the market.
“We snapped it up,” says Steve. “But then we thought: we’ve got the building, now what do we do with it?”
As the great, great, great grandson of William Arnott, founder of the Arnott’s biscuit company, Steve wanted to bake biscuits.
“But legally I couldn’t put my name to them,” he says.  “Allison is a qualified food microbiologist and suggested we try making sourdough.  When she was studying, she’d discovered that sourdough culture (naturally fermented leaven) had been passed down as part of a woman’s dowry in the U.S., and the better the culture, the healthier the family, something which made sense to me because I have an allergy to baker’s yeast.”
The rest is history: the Arnotts now bake a range of traditional, authentic flavourful sourdough breads,  including ‘casalinga’, ‘ciabatta’,  fruit and nut, five seed and light rye; and their brand name, ‘Morpeth Sourdough’, has put the little town on the map once again.
Situated on the fertile alluvial south bank of the Hunter River, a two-hour drive north of Sydney, Morpeth was once known as “the garden of the Hunter”.  Named after its English equivalent, which is the same distance from Newcastle-on-Tyne as Morpeth is from Newcastle in the Hunter Valley, it became one of the most important river ports in NSW and in its heyday (1830 – 1880) even superceded Newcastle in importance. The Anglican  Bishop of Newcastle and his successors lived in Morpeth for nearly half a century, and several iconic Aussie businesses, including Arnott’s (biscuits), Brambles (transport), Soul Pattinson (chemist) and Sims (metal foundry) had their humble beginnings in the town.
With the advent of the Great Northern Railway in the 1890s and the silting of the river, the shipping trade dropped off and Morpeth lost its importance. Interest in the town was revived in the mid 1980s when Trevor Richards, an entrepeneurial businessman, restored the dilapidated Campbell’s Store, converting it into an arts and crafts emporium. Coaches full of elderly people visit in droves four days a week (Thurs – Sun), and come for the various festivals instigated by Richards at the store, including the Festival of Palettes (March), the Honey Festival (late March) and the Teapot Festival (August).
Over the past 5 years, the little town has become more contemporary with the arrival of new businesses such as the rather eccentric award-winning boutique, Princess Bazaar, which sells delicate vintage and bohemian fashions; the refurbished Royal River Inn with new-look restaurant and bar selling boutique beers on tap and organic wines; and charming up-market accommodation at Bronte Guesthouse and Morpeth Convent Guesthouse. Graeme Levick’s Morpeth Wine Cellar is also worth checking out, especially if you’re interested in seeing how moonshine is distilled.  His strawberry and butterscotch flavours are very popular with the ladies, and he also stocks an excellent range of delectable Hunter Valley cheeses.
Last year, the Arnotts opened a swish fine dining restaurant on the second floor of the Arnott’s Bakehouse. The understated elegant interior and stylish tasty food prepared by local chef John Rutherford is a knockout and testament to the new direction in which the town is heading, and a world away from the dainty tea-shops and lace-curtained cafes down cobbled laneways off the main street.

The rattly old Morpeth Bridge

Travel Tip:
Morpeth is a 2 hour drive north of Sydney: take the F3 and then turn onto the New England highway. From there follow the signs to East Maitland and Morpeth. From the north follow the Pacific Highway to Hexham and them turn onto the New England Highway following the signs to Maitland and Morpeth.