The Brewing Industry: Archive Report | PDF - English Heritage

2 Whitbread Archive
The Whitbread Archive was closed in 2001. Some material was kept by Whitbread plc, but the core
collection of historic ledgers was deposited at nearly 50 different record offices; many other items were
donated to museums. London Metropolitan Archives holds the records of Whitbread’s Chiswell Street
Brewery and the company’s London area subsidiaries. They have been catalogued, and details of the
holdings - which extend for well over 100 metres of shelving - are available in the London Metropolitan
Archives online catalogue.
3 Allied Breweries Archive
The Allied Breweries Archive was held at Burton upon Trent until 2002-3, when it was dispersed to 70
different record offices. The story of the rescue of the archives - an estimated 7.5 tons of material - is told in
Anderson and Brown (2003). Recipients of the largest amount of English material were the London
Metropolitan Archives (see section 1.1 above) and the Bass Museum (see section 4 below). Not all have yet
been catalogued, and even when catalogued, they may not appear immediately on the Access to Archives
website.
4 Bass Archive
The Bass Archive was still at Molson Coors Brewing Company (UK) Ltd and the Coors Visitor Centre (see
Richmond and Turton p58) in early 2010. The Allied Breweries, Allsopp’s and Ind Coope records formerly
held at Allied Breweries in Burton (see Richmond and Turton pp41,43,191) were transferred to the Coors
Visitor Centre in 2003. Following the closure of the Visitor Centre in June 2008, it was thought that these
archives might be moved to the Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent Archive Service, but it appears that they
will remain at what is to be the National Brewery Centre, due to open in April 2010.
5 Courage Archive
The Courage Archive was formerly kept on the Courage site in Bristol (previously Bristol Brewery
Georges), but brewing ceased there in 1999 and the area is currently being redeveloped. The archive is now
based at Avonmouth, where there is no direct public access, although research can be undertaken by the
archivist, Dr Ken Thomas (email capelnewydd@tiscali.co.uk). The postal address is: Courage Archive, c/o
Harrow Green, Portview Road, Avonmouth, Bristol BS11 9JG. See Richmond and Turton pp116-9 for
details of the holdings. In addition, the London Metropolitan Archives has a large holding of Courage & Co
material (ACC/2305).
6 How to locate brewing archive material
The first port of call in the hunt for archive material should be the Access to Archives section of the
National Archives website (www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a2a/). The database contains catalogues
describing archives held locally in England and Wales, and searching on the word ‘brewery’ produces
14,017 results. These can be narrowed down by specific local archive, or by archives in a region; for
instance, the North East has 191 holdings. Use the advanced search function to search by specific brewery
name. In general archive work, broader searches are often useful, for instance adding an asterisk to a word
as a ‘wildcard’ - for instance brew* - where it can stand for any number of letters, in this case giving
brewery, breweries, brewer and so forth. Allied topics such as malting may also provide relevant results.
The English Heritage website offers access to a number of searchable photographic and archival
sources; from its home page (www.english-heritage.org.uk), select the ‘Learning and Resources’ section
then look for Online Resources. These include ViewFinder, a photographic archive; Pastscape, for records
in the national historic environment database; Images of England, with descriptions and photographs of
listed buildings up to the year 2000; and the Heritage Gateway, which allows the user to search across
national and local records of historic sites and buildings. See section 10 below for website addresses.
Another useful source is the British Library’s searchable archive of British Newspapers 1800-1900. The
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