Maidenhead Breweries

Transcript

Breweries have always played a big role here

Breweries in the Maidenhead area have always played a major part in the local economy.

By the mid-17th century, Thomas Gibbons occupied brewery premises near the church in Cookham. The Ray family, who owned the business in the early 18th century, moved it to School Lane and, a century later, it became part of Neville Reid and Co’s Windsor Brewery. A picturesque range of the former brewery buildings survives there to this day.

From the mid-Victorian period, brewing became the principal industry in Maidenhead and brought great prosperity to the town.

The origins of Maidenhead’s main brewery started with humble beginnings when, in 1820, Robert Nicholson, a grocer in the High Street, started brewing beer at the back of his shop. This was taken over by his son, William, who in 1840 built a small red-brick building on the site of the stables of a coaching inn called the White Hart.

Originally known as the Pineapple Steam Brewery, it became so successful that the building was extended to cope with the demand for beer by Maidenhead’s expanding population. In 1862, Nicholson’s brewery employed 14 workers, rising to 150 by 1936.

By the 1880s, Nicholson’s had started to take over other breweries in the area, such as the Imperial Brewery in Uxbridge and Maidenhead’s East Berkshire Brewery in King Street in 1895. This had originally been known as Folyes Brewery and was founded in 1850 by George Braxton, who had worked as a cooper at Nicholson’s.

By 1903, Nicholson’s Brewery was supplying beer to more than 150 pubs in the Maidenhead area alone. The company expanded further in 1906, when it swallowed up the old-established Langton’s Brewery on the corner of Market Street and West Street.

Langton’s had been founded in the early 18th century and seems to have been Maidenhead’s first town brewery. From the mid-18th to the early 19th century, it supplied beer and hot-cross buns to schoolchildren in West Street. The old brewery building, which was behind the High Street shops, was not demolished until the 1970s.

By 1915, Nicholson’s had acquired another Maidenhead brewery, known as Fuller, Story and Co. Founded in the 1820s by John Fuller, it had originally stood on Ray Mill Island and was inherited by JT Bell. Renamed The Thames Brewery in 1863, its specialities were pale ale and porter.

Bell’s Brewery had moved by 1833 to central Maidenhead, its site in King Street being close to the railway station. Although it was demolished in the 1970s, Bell Street, which was named after it, still acts as a marker.

Nicholson’s brewery was bought by brewing giants Courage Ltd in 1956 and, within two years, the production of beer had ceased. It was demolished in the 1980s and replaced by the Nicholson’s Walk shopping centre.

All that now remains of the massive brewing complex of Nicholson’s Brewery is the very rare survival of a two-storey stable block in Nicholson’s Lane, which is now a Grade II listed building.

● Brewing up for the Royal Wedding, see page 3 of the Business Review, pull-out

■ COMPANY SNAP: A Nicholson’s Drayman and employees stand outside the brewery offices in Maidenhead High Street.

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