A popular sweet shop is due to celebrate an amazing 45 years in business.

Walking into Reg Harrington's sweet shop in Richmond Road, Kingston, is like stepping back in time. Customers choose boiled sweets from the tall glass jars that line the shelves, then watch them being weighed on scales and tipped into tiny paper bags.

Most of Reg's customers are regulars, but occasional first-time visitors are so enchanted they take a photograph.

Reg has been in the sweets business for 45 years, and his is a rare breed of store in this modern age: a shop run by a man who regards the selling of confectionery as a specialist business, and who has never wanted to extend his range of goods beyond sweets, cigarettes and a small selection of greetings cards. His only concession to modern practice is that the scales on the counter show the weight in grams but also register ounces to reassure older customers.

Reg's only problem these days is to find firms who still supply the jars of boiled sweets his customers crave, with mouth-watering names such as rosy apples, rhubarb and custard, and pineapple chunks (Bristows of Devon is one of the few that still supply them).

He opened his shop at 141 Richmond Road on January 25, 1960, "in the middle of a blizzard," he recalls. He came from Wallington, where his family had run a grocery for 39 years.

Now the small shops, including a fishmonger and a popular wool shop, that were once his Richmond Road neighbours, have all disappeared.

Even at 78, Reg has no intention of retiring because he enjoys his work and meeting his customers. They range from the elderly (he was recently invited to a customer's 100th birthday party) to eager children on their way home from school.

He runs the shop unaided, closing for just one day a week, and until recently spent his day off on his boat in Sussex, or walking on the Isle of Wight.

He has never married.

"Nobody would have me," he said, "but there were plenty of girlfriends."

Local resident Michael Davison said: "Everybody in our area knows him, and he always has a wave for familiar faces passing his window, even if, like me, they're neither sweet eaters or smokers."

He added: "We'd like to see his anniversary marked in The Comet."

jsampson@london.newsquest.co.uk