Sourdough Hub adds outdoor seating after booming first months

Sourdough Hub’s new outdoor seating is a small change with a clear message: this Newmarket bakery is becoming a place to stay, not just a place to collect a sourdough loaf and move on. By late May, tables and chairs had been added outside the High Street shop, giving the business a street-side presence that fits a bakery already drawing repeat custom and steady footfall.

The pavement licence matters because it changes how 47 High Street works in practice. In England, that permission allows removable furniture on the pavement or highway beside the premises for serving or consuming food and drink, and Newmarket council papers placed Sourdough Hub’s application on the Development and Planning Committee agenda in early May. For Jennifer Marshall, the seating felt like a natural extension of the shop and a way to make use of good weather without leaving customers stuck in direct sun on the frontage. That is the kind of detail that turns a busy bakery into a neighbourhood fixture.

The move makes sense in the context of the bakery’s first months. Sourdough Hub opened at 47 High Street on Saturday, January 31, 2026, after Marshall had already built demand over about 18 months at Craven Way. The business began with fortnightly openings there, then shifted to every Saturday as interest grew, before moving into the town-centre site that had been announced in late November 2025. Early days at the High Street branch brought queues out the door and a busy first month, enough to justify both the outdoor seating and an expansion in opening days.

Marshall’s own route to the bakery helps explain the loyalty behind that growth. A former international concert pianist, she is originally from Malta, where she first ran a micro bakery before moving to the UK in 2022 with her husband Wayne and their children, Martina and James. At Sourdough Hub, she has leaned on locally sourced ingredients, including flour from Wicken Windmill, flour from Fosters Mill at Swaffham Prior and produce from Waterland Organics Ltd at Lode. The High Street shop has been supplied from the Craven Way unit, keeping production tied to the same small-batch roots even as the public-facing side has widened.

The menu also shows why the bakery can work as a third place. Alongside sourdough bread, it has offered pastries, winter soups, focaccia sandwiches, coffees and matchas, with planned items including baguettes, cinnamon rolls, brownies and frangipane tarts. In May, Marshall also extended service to Sundays, adding to Wednesday-through-Saturday trading. Put together, the longer hours and outdoor tables show a bakery that has already moved past launch mode and into the slower, more durable business of becoming part of the street itself.