‘Salt of the earth’: the Newcastle shopkeeper who gives bread to his neighbours in need
Sheraz Awan donates thousands of free items from his cornershop each year, knowing that many of his Westerhope community are food impoverished
Six years ago, Sheraz Awan, who owns a corner shop in Westerhope, Newcastle, overheard one of his customers tell her children that they would not be able to eat more food that day. He was confused by the remark and asked her about it.
“She told me, ‘It’s not what you think. It’s not a punishment, we just don’t have any more food left in the house,’” Awan, 49, recalls. “So I just filled up her shopping bags with noodles and bread and other things I could think of.”
Awan was still thinking about that interaction the next day, and wondered if the mother he met was not likely to be his only customer struggling to put food on the table. He decided he would order an extra crate of bread that week to give out for free.
A food stand offering bread and other staples has been standing outside his shop ever since. The demand has only grown with each passing year.
Awan says he gave out on average 2,000 loaves of bread a week throughout 2025, though the same number of loaves was claimed on Christmas Day alone. The donations are funded by the shop income.
Sheraz’s Westerhope Convenience Store is surrounded by some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in England, and the cost of living crisis is felt viscerally by many of its residents.
“People don’t want to think about it,” he says. “They think everyone has a Christmas dinner to sit down to and a family to spend the day with, but that is just not true.”
Awan’s love for his community is palpable. Standing on the shop floor, he can barely say two sentences without stopping to chat to his customers, most of whom he knows by name. The front of his shop is stocked with products from small home-grown brands such as Khadija Cake brownies, made by a Newcastle baker, and bottles of Hollin House Farm milkshakes, produced by a small dairy farm in Huddersfield.
Peeking from between the shelves are the strips of the local amateur football teams, which Awan sponsors. Though Awan had never picked up the sport himself — he did not have the time, spending most of his youth behind the till — he takes great pride in Westerhope and its residents.
Awan inherited the corner shop business from his parents who emigrated to the UK from Pakistan more than 40 years ago. He began helping his parents on the shop floor at six years old and says he became an expert at 11, spending hours there after school. At 17 he took over the family business to allow his parents to retire.
“My parents came to a country that was called Great Britain, where people came to make their fortune and support their family,” he says. “I don’t think they thought they would live to see a day when people here were struggling to buy food and the government would refuse to help them.”
Though Awan says the Newcastle suburb feels more like “a small village”, it took years of perseverance to build a home there. The city of Newcastle is diverse, yet Muslims make up only 2% of people living in Westerhope.
“When we were kids it was much harder,” he recalls. “My parents couldn’t speak English clearly and we were some of the only Asian people here. Even today, I think I am the only Asian shopkeeper in the area.”
He remembers seeing his mother behind the counter face abuse and violence.
“I’ve seen her punched in the face, I’ve seen her swept off her feet. I’ve seen it happen tens of times,” he says. “Our shop was opposite a pub and every weekend people would get drunk, take drugs and come to our shop to mess up Asian people.”
Every week, he says, his mother would cry and beg his father to sell the shop and move.
“But my dad said that wherever we go, we will have to go through this again and again,” he recalls. “It was better to stay and ride the wave and now we have come out the other end.”
Still, it has not been easy. “There were certain times I felt like giving up,” Awan admits. The free food has attracted some ill-intentioned attention, he says, and he found some of his free loaves being resold for profit by rival cornershops. But the messages of support became his source of motivation.
“They feel like a pat on the back. Like people are telling me to keep going and that all the trouble I am going through is worth it.”
In December, Awan was voted the Community Champion by fellow Newcastle residents for the sixth time in a row. He regularly receives messages from the community for his work. His customers are quick to give compliments and good wishes.
“Our car broke down near the shop,” recalls Lina Best, a local customer. “Sheraz gave us free drinks and offered parking space and even sandwiches. In this crazy world there are still stars.”
The Facebook page for the shop, which now has more than 16,000 followers, is flooded with similarly positive comments. Sheraz is described as “salt of the earth” and “kind and generous”.
“Westerhope is lucky to have you in our community,” a local resident wrote to him.
“People in London or Leeds message to say ‘I just buried my grandad or grandma but I know they always passed your shop and they picked up one item or two. You are a lifesaver,” Awan says. “Stuff like this really tickles the inside and warms one’s cockles.”
After more than 30 years of 16-hour shifts, Awan is eyeing up business opportunities that would allow him to transition out of shopkeeping and do a nine-to-five, but he is determined to continue his community work, whatever he does.
“I’ll never stop doing the bread,” he says. “Whether it is from this shop or from a different business, I don’t think I will ever stop.”
