Vintage Cooke's 1980s-1990s Lemon Barley Water 🍋 Label

Remember Cooke's Lemon Barley Water? 🍋 Lemon & Barley Water: A King's Drink, a Wimbledon Tradition and a Label That Dates Itself

Size: 3 3/4" x 3"

A paper bottle label from Cooke's (W'boro') Ltd. of Wellingborough, England, for Lemon & Barley Water: a glistening wedge of lemon crossed by two golden ears of grain, a big brush-script "Cooke's" across the top and DILUTE TO TASTE beside the picture. Barley water is one of the oldest soft drinks in England, recorded by 1320 and drunk by George III on his ride home from the hunt, and the lemon version became the drink of Wimbledon. The label's own small print tells you when it was printed: the preservatives are listed by their European E numbers, E221 and E220, and that makes it a 1980s–1990s label. Vintage, not antique.

It measures 3 3/4" x 3" ~, printed on white paper with rounded corners. Along the bottom run 710ml on the left and 25 fl oz on the right (710 millilitres is 25 imperial fluid ounces), with the maker's line beneath: COOKE'S (W'BORO') LTD. WELLINGBOROUGH. The back is plain paper, the front printing faintly showing through in reverse.

🔎 What the Label Says

The ingredients panel reads: water, sugar, lemon juice, citric acid, barley flour, flavoring, artificial sweetener-saccharin, preservative E221, E220. The bottle held a concentrate made with real lemon juice and barley flour, sweetened with sugar and saccharin together, meant to be poured into a glass and topped up with water until it tasted right.

🧪 How the Small Print Dates It

E numbers are codes from a single European list of approved food additives. The list was first agreed for food colorings in 1962, preservatives were added in 1964, antioxidants in 1970, and emulsifiers and thickeners in 1974; the E stands for Europe. On this label E220 is sulphur dioxide and E221 is sodium sulphite, both preservatives.

In England and Wales the Food Labelling Regulations 1984 (SI 1984/1305) came into operation on 19 September 1984. They carried a schedule of additive categories that must be named in a list of ingredients by category name, and a schedule of serial numbers for additives. On 20 November 1984 the government answered a question in the House of Commons with the deadline: all additives, except flavorings, which present special labeling problems, had to be identified by name or serial number in the ingredients list on prepackaged foods by 1 July 1986. Read the Cooke's panel with that in mind. "Preservative" is followed by its numbers, "artificial sweetener" by its name, and "flavouring" stands on its own as a plain word, just as the flavorings exception allowed.

Sulphur dioxide has the longest pedigree of anything on the panel. The Romans discovered that burning sulphur candles inside empty wine vessels kept them fresh and free of the smell of vinegar, and winemakers still rely on it against spoilage. As E220 it also keeps dried apricots and figs from spoiling.

🌾 Barley Water: Seven Centuries in the English Kitchen

Before anyone bottled it, barley water was simply pearl barley boiled in water, a drink from the domestic kitchen. It is recorded in England at least as early as 1320, and it survived the centuries so quietly that the seventeenth-century writer Thomas Fuller called it "an invention which found out itself". Its roots go further back still: the ancient Greeks drank kykeon, made mainly of water and barley, both at sacred rites and in peasant cottages.

Its most famous devotee was George III, "Farmer George". The diarist Fanny Burney reported that the King refreshed himself with barley water as he rode home from a hard day's hunting, although his courtiers did not share his enthusiasm for so mild a drink after a day in the saddle.

🎾 Lemon Meets Barley: Robinsons and Wimbledon

Then came the lemon. Robinsons, founded in 1823 by George Robinson and Alexander Belville, made patent barley, and in 1930 Eric Smedley Hodgson combined the company's barley crystals with real lemon juice and sugar. The story goes that he mixed his first batches for the players and umpires at Wimbledon, where the drink went down so well that he was invited back. Lemon barley water was marketed with the Wimbledon Championships from 1935, a partnership that lasted 86 years until it ended in 2022.

Lemon squash was on the market a little earlier. By 1890 squash was sold as a still, cloudy, ready-to-drink juice drink, and concentrated lemon squash was introduced into Britain just before the First World War, gradually taking the name for itself. Northamptonshire bottlers stocked it early: in 1910 J. W. Bright of Rushden, a neighbouring town, advertised lemon squash cordial and lime juice cordial in the Rushden Echo, alongside orange champagne, cherry cider and stone ginger beer.

🏙️ Wellingborough: The Town of Wells

Cooke's squeezed its town into its company name as W'BORO'. Wellingborough, in Northamptonshire, grew from Wendelingburgh, "Waendel's burh", a fortified place, and on 3 April 1201 King John granted a market charter to the Abbot and monks of Crowland for a Wednesday market there. Five wells ring the town, the Redwell, Hemmingwell, Witche's Well, Lady's Well and Whytewell, and all five stand on its coat of arms.

In the seventeenth century those waters made Wellingborough fashionable. The Duchess of Buckingham came to drink them about 1624; three years later Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria received the Mantuan ambassador in the town, and the Queen seems to have come again in 1628. The legend of the Red Well, as the county historians Morton in 1712 and Cole in 1837 told it, is that the King and Queen lived in tents a whole season on the hillside to drink its iron-rich water pure at the source. In 1811 a correspondent of the Northampton Mercury still recommended it for indigestion, debility and a pallid countenance. The spring later served as a stone watering trough for horses, and the council restored it in 2011.

The town made its later living from boots and shoes, ironworks, brewing and mineral waters. In January 1916, with the First World War raising the "costs of materials, labour and transport", eight mineral water makers from Kettering, Rushden and Wellingborough put their names to a joint notice raising their prices. Four of them were Wellingborough firms: F. Cooke Ltd., Campbell Praed & Co. Ltd., C. Cobley, and W. Dulley & Sons Ltd. Their drinks went out in patent bottles, corked bottles, stone ginger beer bottles and soda syphons. In the post-war decades Wellingborough took in families moving out of London, and it counted 56,564 people at the 2021 census.

🖼️ Display

This label is becoming uncommon. Imagine hanging this vintage advertising on your wall as home decor in any room: the lemon yellow and barley gold suit a kitchen, a pantry door, a café corner or a summer tennis room. My pictures seriously don't do it justice.

❓ Questions People Ask

How old is this Cooke's Lemon & Barley Water label?

Its two preservatives are printed as E221 and E220, set out the way British ingredient panels had to be from mid-1986. It is a 1980s–1990s label, vintage rather than antique.

What is lemon barley water?

A concentrate of lemon juice, sugar and barley that you dilute with water. Plain barley water goes back to medieval England; the lemon version was created for Robinsons in 1930 and served at Wimbledon.

What are E220 and E221?

Sulphur dioxide and sodium sulphite, two preservatives on the European additive list.

Where was Cooke's based?

In Wellingborough, Northamptonshire. The label is signed COOKE'S (W'BORO') LTD. WELLINGBOROUGH.

What size is it?

3 3/4" x 3" ~.