What Aitkens Bakery was

Aitkens was a family-run bakery in Aberdeen, and the item that carried its reputation was the buttery, known locally as a rowie. That pairing of a small family firm with a single regional bake is what gave the name weight in the north-east.

For a sense of how far the name travelled, the firm's Aberdeen butteries were the detail picked out in national reporting on its then boss in 2018.

Where the shop stood

The address is 202 Holburn Street, Mannofield, Aberdeen AB10 6DA.

If you want to place it before a trip, use the AB10 postcode rather than the street name alone, since Holburn Street runs for a good distance. There is no reason to make the address a stop in its own right now that the shop has gone.

Its status today: shut, not sold on

The premises are recorded as permanently closed, with no trading days listed for any day of the week. That is the plain position: there is no counter, no morning rush and nothing to buy at the Holburn Street address.

When the firm's boss was jailed in September 2018, reporting said the business was in the process of being sold. Nothing here should be read as a completed sale, a named buyer or current ownership, because none of that is established.

The detail worth keeping is that the site did not simply vanish. A different Aberdeen Baker later took on the former Aitkens premises in Torry, a separate site from the closed Holburn Street shop, as its production base, which is how the buttery thread carries on under another name.

What a buttery or rowie actually is

A buttery and a rowie are the same thing under two names: a flat, salty, laminated roll built on flour, butter or fat, and plenty of salt. It is a breakfast and elevenses bake rather than a sweet treat, and it is bound up with Aberdeen and the wider north-east rather than Scotland as a whole.

How you eat it is a fair test of whether you have understood it. Splitting and toasting one, then adding butter or jam, is the usual approach; eating it cold and plain tells you what the dough is like but not why locals rate it.

The other thing to know is that freshness is not the selling point. Butteries were designed to keep, which is why they sit in a paper bag on a counter rather than in a pastry case, and why a bag bought in the morning is still worth toasting the next day.

Where to buy butteries in Aberdeen now

The Bread Guys Bakery makes a signature buttery and runs two Aberdeen shops, plus a production site that began life as the Aitkens bakery premises in Torry. The first shop opened in Torry in June 2020, and a second on Great Northern Road opened in June 2021.

Both shops are useful for different trips. Torry sits south of the river and close to the harbour side, while Great Northern Road is on the northern edge of the city, opposite Kittybrewster Primary School, so pick whichever suits the direction you are already travelling.

The bakery's own account of its background runs through the old north-east baking names, including the long-standing Kelly of Cults, which is the kind of lineage that matters more than any shopfront styling. It also explains the wholesale side, so a buttery you meet in a café may well have come from the same ovens.

Hours, what is on the shelf at a given time and whether the butteries have sold out are all things the shop can answer and this page cannot. Ring ahead or check before you build a morning around it, particularly at weekends.

Nearby: where Holburn Street sits

Mannofield is a short run south-west of the centre, which makes the old Aitkens address easy to pass rather than a destination. If you are in that part of town, the sensible plan is to carry on into the centre for the rest of the day.

Two food stops make a better anchor for a day out than a closed bakery. The Ashvale Aberdeen is a long-established name for fish and chips, while the Prince of Wales Aberdeen is the sort of traditional pub you want at the end of a cold walk rather than the start.

If your interest is drink rather than dough, the Grill Aberdeen has a reputation built on whisky, and Fierce Beer Aberdeen covers the modern end of the city's brewing. Neither is a substitute for a rowie, but either rounds off a day spent moving between the centre, Torry and Great Northern Road.

Should you still track down the old Aitkens address?

No. Aitkens Bakery is closed at Holburn Street, so there is nothing to see, buy or book, and the address is only useful for placing the name on a map of Mannofield.

Go to one of The Bread Guys Bakery shops instead, check that day's baking before you travel, and treat the buttery as the point of the stop rather than a souvenir. That is the honest way to follow the thread to the present.