'We guarantee tender': Blackpool man hopes to win Britain's best butcher award at House of Lords

Blackpool-trained butcher Mark Duckworth, the recently-crowned Northern Butcher of the Year, is heading down to the House of Lords to fight for the right to be called the best butcher in Britain.

Having been crowned ‘Best Butcher in the North of England’ at the 2025 Countryside Alliance Awards, Dales Butchers from Kirkby Lonsdale supplies customers with local meats from farms around Lancashire, Cumbria, and North Yorkshire.

Heralded for ‘outstanding service, imaginative marketing, and strong community spirit’, butcher Mark Duckworth and his team are now preparing to compete against fellow winners from across the UK for the ultimate industry accolade - the national title at a special Champions’ Reception in London on Wednesday 18 June.

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Dales Butchers has been serving local communities for more than 120 years, with Mark taking the reins in 1999. He started in the industry at 13 years old, training at Blackpool and Fylde College - then considered to be one the UK’s best training colleges for butchery – before gaining valuable experience at Lancashire’s prestigious Northcote hotel and Michelin starred restaurant at Langho.

It was during a stint at a North Yorkshire farm shop at Wigglesworth near Skipton that he discovered his second love of pie-making and perfected many of the award-winning pies he still prepares for customers today.

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Dales

“We prepare all our meats using traditional methods to guarantee most tender and flavoursome results,” said Mark. “For example, dry-ageing our meats helps retain a more concentrated flavour, unlike the majority of supermarket meat which is aged in vacuum packs, making it less tender.”

Himself the owner of Avanti Restaurant and Bar, a fellow independent family-run business in Kirkby Lonsdale, Graeme Gladwinfield said: “We treat our suppliers as a key part of our success, so we’re proud to buy all our fresh meat, sausage, and cured pancetta from Dales Butchers just a few doors down the road, rather than a faceless wholesaler who doesn’t immediately know where individual cuts of meat have come from.

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“Understanding authentic food provenance and its journey to people’s plates is really valuable for our customers, and our relationship with Dales means we can literally point at the farms where our meat is sourced,” he added. “Best of luck to Mark and the team representing not just Kirkby Lonsdale, but the whole of Northern England, at the House of Lords.”

Dales Butchers’ roll of honour already includes being named as ‘Britain’s Best Butchers Shop’ in 2021, producing ‘Britain’s Best Sausage’ in 2023, and multiple awards for handmade pies at the British Pie Awards and the World Championship Scotch Pie Awards.

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Dales Traditional Butchers

Dales also secured The Golden Haggis Award in 2024 and 2025 – the first English butcher to win this prestigious Scottish award two years running.

“We’re all excited about the prospect of potentially winning another national award – and that’s a testament to our fantastic customers, staff and wider community who’ve helped get us here,” Mark said. “However, we don’t rest on our laurels! Looking to the future, it’s also about keeping up with new trends and opportunities.

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“Take our dining and tapas ranges, which are proving very popular,” he added. “Our self-catering packs for people visiting the local area are taking off too, rapidly growing from just a couple of premium meals to around two hundred sold every week.

“Plus,the online side of the business is continuing to grow and we now have repeat customers from as far afield as Scotland and even Cornwall”.

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