Charity shop bookshelves can hold such treasures. This weekend I uncovered a real gem – a book called Wrapping It Up: 50 Years of British Packaging Design 1920–1970 by design historian, industrial psychologist and publisher Ruth Artmonsky and design librarian Stella Harpley. I have barely put it down since. I feel like it’s joining up all these dots in my head, mapping out the evolution of some iconic British brands.

One chapter on chocolate takes me back to my granny’s, as a child. Whenever we arrived at her house, Granny immediately got to work bringing out the sweet treats and endeavoured to keep us chomping on them until the moment we left. Lurid cherry pop delivered in a glass bottle by the milkman, tins of juicy black morello cherries served up with vanilla ice cream, pretty slices of Battenburg cake, Club bars thickly covered in something that was still allowed to be called chocolate, and ‘Flakey’ bars in their sunshine yellow twisted cellophane wrappers with smooth purple letterforms that identified them as Cadbury’s products.

I’d always assumed these chocolate bars, and other favourites of my childhood – Galaxies, Aeros, Mars Bars – were relatively recent arrivals; surely, they didn’t predate me by too many years? I suppose I thought Granny had picked up her love of Flakes later in life, enamoured of the way the crumbly chocolate melts as it hits your mouth. So, I was surprised to read in Wrapping It Up that the 99-maker arrived around the same time as she did, in the 1920s, along with Fruit & Nut and Crunchies; Dairy Milk was Cadbury’s earliest breakthrough, launching in 1905.

The first chocolate bar was developed by Joseph Fry in my hometown of Bristol in 1847, beginning decades of chocolate experimentation that has continued to the present day. A later innovation, Terry’s Chocolate Orange, was launched as ‘Terry’s Chocolate Dessert Orange’ in its famous foil wrapper and dinky box in 1932, six years after the advent of the intriguing Terry’s Dessert Chocolate Apple.

As a child, I loved reaching into the bumpy pillowcase at the foot of my bed on Christmas morning and pulling out a Chocolate Orange or Cadbury’s stocking – a selection of chocolate bars seasonally encased in vacuum-formed stocking-shaped trays and held in with plastic netting so satisfying to tear away. But I must confess, I’ve been a bit sniffy about putting such things in my own daughter’s stockings. Instead, I try to opt for something ‘higher quality’ – smaller, with limited, plastic-free packaging, always Fair Trade and hopefully palm-oil free (at ten, my poor daughter’s barely eaten a full-sized version of any of the classic bars). But with this newly discovered respect for their heritage, I might keep a lookout for Chocolate Oranges or even a net-free chocolate bar stocking this week.

I have also gained a new appreciation for those most ubiquitous of Christmas chocolates – Roses – in their bright blue ‘Dorothy Bag’ box, now that I know that they were named in tribute to the Rose Bros. of Gainsborough, early pioneers of automated packaging manufacturing. The first boxes of chocolates were expensive commodities. The famous Quaker chocolate houses – Fry’s, Cadbury’s and Rowntree’s – sometimes commissioned fine artists to paint beautiful designs to adorn their premium rigid board boxes. They were saved for the most special moments – often as a prelude to a marriage proposal. That all changed, however, with the introduction of Cadbury’s first mass-produced mixed chocolate assortment, Milk Tray, in 1915, which had much simpler packaging.

It was funny to realise that the famous ‘All because the lady loves…’ ads we grew up watching were a tongue-in-cheek nod to this heritage; that Milk Tray – the ‘pocket box of chocolates’ – was taking on the original role of grand romantic gesture. I’m not so sure that boxes of chocolates play that part today. But a quick walk through Tesco reveals that chocolate makers are still commissioning artists to design special edition chocolate boxes – French designer Camille Walala’s Memphis Group-inspired patterns are currently giving new life to Rowntree’s After Eight boxes (the after-dinner mints were launched after WWII in sophisticated minimalist black boxes, following on from the success of Black Magic).

The three big Quaker-owned chocolatiers that treated their employees and communities with the same respect that they treated the markets were bought out by multinationals like Kraft and Nestlé years ago. But new brands, such as Tony’s Chocolony, are attempting to carry the torch of ethical business practices, albeit with a more playful approach to brand identity and packaging design. What’s your take on British chocolate? Should we treasure the old brands with their long heritage? Or have you given them up in favour of exciting disruptors like Dubai chocolate or more ethical brands like Tony’s and Green & Blacks?

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