Fizziwigg’s

As sweet shops go, Fizziwiggs goes the old-​fashioned route: instead of offering unique, handmade items, every particular sweet you may like is on offer in droves. This is not a problem: I’m a fan of the old-​fashioned sweet shop myself, it just seems a little dull next to all of the handmade chocolates and cakes the Lanes has to offer. Still, if you like your jellybabies and your white mice, this is the place for you!
Fizziwiggs has gone out of its way to emulate the oldie-​timey sweet shop, and the décor is exactly what you’d hope and expect for: lots and lots of glass jars, showing off their contents to all potential customers. However, instead of the classic wood and ladders on wheels, Fizziwiggs is decked with bright colours, creating an excellent, playful childlike environment: exactly what you want for enticing you to buy sweets. Speaking of sweets… There is literally everything here you might want. I’m not going to list them all, suffice it to say if you want it, they probably have it.
This is, however, the biggest sticking point for Fizziwiggs… it isn’t very original. Brighton, and the Lanes in particular, are full of lovely little shops selling unique, home-​made sweets, from cupcakes to chocolates. A simple sweet-​shop just isn’t enough. Maybe I’m a little spoiled with all this choice, but I would rarely go here over the cupcake place around the corner, or the chocolatiers in the Arcade. It just isn’t special enough, and for Brighton, that may as well be a death knell.
If you’re looking for basic sweets, including some old favourites, you couldn’t do worse than Fizziwiggs: it offers exactly what’s on the tin. However, with no original products of their own, Fizziwiggs is perilously close to be just another corner shop that specialises in sweets. It needs some sort of oomph to help it stand out from it’s more original neighbours, and currently, I can’t see any.

Fizziwigg’s looks like the kind of sweet shop Roahl Dahl must have visited when writing his beloved Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. Admittedly, there’s no chocolate lake or golden hens — just hundreds of big glass jars filled with colourful, old fashioned sweets. We’re talking rhubarb and custards, cola cubes, cherry lips, pear drops, white mice, cough candy and hundreds of other sugary treats.
Vegans and diabetics are catered for with special ranges of animal and sugar free sweets and the prices aren’t bad for the location either. In the run upto Christmas, there was a special display made of red, white and green whirly lollipops and candy canes. Right now however, there’s a mosiac of the Queen made from over 10,000 jellybeans. The question isn’t — how long did it take to make but how long could you have it in your home before pinching a couple here and a couple there? In my case, not long enough!

Any shop that has a picture of the Queen made out of jelly beans as its window display has got to be good. And Fizziwigs not only has that, but also lollies the size of my head in its window.
These things lured me in, but I wasn’t disappointed with what I found inside. Rows of gleaming old-​school sweet jars full of colourful, sugary goodness, sticks of stripy rock and swirly lollies that my seven year old self would’ve adored. Come to think of it, my thirty year old self adores them too.
This is a Victorian style fairytale sweetshop modernised, definitely the place to come for traditional sweets.