From: Victorian Pubs (1984), by Mark Girouard:
“…Even in the pubs which they did build, the brewers were not, on the whole, the pace-setters for the rest; the exception is the Cannon Brewery, a newly refurbished firm anxious to put across its image, which helped to popularize the Flemish style for pubs in the 1890s.
…(Henry Whitebridge) Rising designed churches in Bristol, Wolverhampton and outer London, but the principal item in the list of his buildings given in his obituary is ‘many works for the Cannon Brewery’…there is little doubt that Shoebridge and Rising did all the architectural work for “that enterprising firm” in their campaign of buying, rebuilding and refurbishing pubs during the 1890s. But they were clearly prepared to work for other pub clients as well…
Shoebridge and Rising were a perfect choice to satisfy both the Cannon Brewery, which probably wanted rather more literate architecture than most publicans, and the potential users of the pubs, who wanted to feel that they were having an evening out…”
From: ‘St John Street: East side’, in Survey of London: Volume 46, South and East Clerkenwell, ed. Philip Temple (2008):
“Cannon Brewery site. The Cannon Brewery originated with a brewhouse attached to the Unicorn inn, which stood towards the northern end of the site. It was in existence by the early 1670s. Known as the Horseshoe by the 1740s, it was the twelfth-largest of the 52 principal London breweries in 1759, producing more than 23,000 of their combined annual output of 975,000 barrels. In 1764 the brewery was acquired, with other property in the vicinity, by Samuel and Rivers Dickinson of Chick Lane, whose family were long-established brewers and maltsters in London and Hertfordshire. Their father, Rivers, had been an associate of Edward Godfrey, proprietor of the brewery for many years until 1715.
Under the Dickinsons and their sons the brewery was enlarged, and the Unicorn rebuilt and renamed the St John of Jerusalem. Rivers Dickinson is traditionally credited with establishing the name Cannon Brewery, to distinguish it from another family business, but no documentary evidence is known to support this. Retirement and bankruptcy brought the partnership to an end by 1818, when the brewery was sold at auction, and shortly afterwards the premises were broken up for various commercial uses.
By 1822 Henry Gardner had established a brewery on part of a former vinegar yard adjoining the former Horseshoe brewery on the south. In partnership with his brothers William and Philip, he gradually expanded the premises, taking over most of the Dickinsons’ former site. It appears to have been the Gardners’ establishment that was first referred to as the Cannon Brewery, appearing as such on the map accompanying Cromwell’s Clerkenwell in 1827. In 1863 the Gardners sold the brewery and 59 associated public houses for over £110,000, to George Hanbury and Barclay Field.
Hanbury and Field made a number of additions and improvements during the 1870s, of which one building, the Brewery Yard Offices, survives.
In 1876 the business was reconstructed as the Cannon Brewery Co., subsequent growth and expansion being driven by William Wroughton and Andrew Motion, who became partners in the firm in 1876 and 1889 respectively. They aggressively pursued the tied-house system, buying up over 100 public houses, and in 1895 floated the Cannon Brewery Co. Ltd, raising £ 1m in share capital. Some new building had been undertaken in the 1870s under Field & Co., and this was followed by a major programme of rebuilding and expansion in the 1890s, when the site was extended eastwards to Berry Street and Pardon Street.
In 1930 the Cannon Brewery Co. was acquired by the Taylor Walker group, subsequently part of Ind Coope (Allied Breweries from 1963). Seriously damaged during the Blitz of 1940–1, the brewery resumed production after the war, but closed in 1955. In the early 1960s the northern part of the brewery was demolished for a new headquarters building, Allied House, facing St John Street, and an NCP car park. Allied House, designed by Llewellyn Smith & Partners, was an eight-storey slab, unrelated in scale and character to its neighbours. This and some of the old brewery buildings were used by Allied as offices, stores and garaging, until its departure in the late 1980s, following which Allied House was demolished and much of the brewery site cleared.
The oldest surviving building is the former Brewery Yard Offices. This was erected directly behind the old main entrance in 1874–5. Built of soft red brick with stone dressings, with an ogee-capped turret and bracket clock,
it comprised a counting-house and offices above a basement beer-cellar. Carved barley and hops decorate the capitals of the doorway,
a theme continued in coloured mosaic on the floor inside. The architect is not known; the contractor was Thomas Elkington of Golden Lane.
Two large blocks, now demolished, were built in 1891–3, to designs by the architects Francis Chambers & Son. These were a warehouse fronting St John Street, on the site of the later Allied House, and a range immediately behind, comprising stables and stores for forage and beer. Holland & Hannen were the contractors, as they were for all the major building works at the brewery during its enlargement and reconstruction over the next six or seven years. This programme, costing about £250,000, was overseen not by Chambers but by William Bradford & Sons, the specialist brewers’ architects. Bradford, it was announced in 1893, had prepared designs ‘for the whole of the works’, a model of which was exhibited in 1894. Chambers & Son, however, were still evidently retained to do certain work, dealing with the London County Council in 1895 over the erection of a brick ‘corridor’, and the two firms may to some extent have been working in conjunction.
The entrance block at Nos 156–160, originally offices and caretaker’s accommodation, was designed by William Bradford & Sons and built in 1894–5. In general terms, this followed the stylistic lead set by the Chambers & Sons warehouse adjoining, but with some extra ornamental work, including panels of moulded brick and particularly elaborate entrance gates, constructed of wood with applied iron decorations.
The range adjoining to the south, Nos 148–154, was designed by Bradfords for the Cannon Brewery Co. in 1914, but not erected until 1924–5. Its first occupants in 1927 were the shopfitters Pollards, who used it for storage, and installed the present shopfronts.
At the rear of the site, backing on to Berry Street
between Dallington and Northburgh Streets, is the former fermenting house, No. 16 Brewhouse Yard. Designed by Bradfords, this was erected in phases in 1895–8 on the site of model dwellings erected only a few years earlier (Sutton Buildings, see page 289).
The fermenting house was arranged as basement beer stores, ground-floor packing rooms, yeast or ‘brewers’ rooms on the first floor, skimming rooms on the second, and laboratories with fermenting and tank rooms on the third—all with white glazed-brick walls to keep conditions cool and hygienic. Not all the building had solid flooring: the workers moved between the slate fermenting vessels on boarded gangways. The upper floor, lined with matchboard and partly top-lit by louvres and lanterns, housed the coolers and refrigerators, and the roof held a 36,000– gallon cast-iron water-tank. To take the weight of the plant, the floors were of concrete arch construction, supported on cast-iron circular columns and wrought-iron compound girders, and the building was divided internally into three separate blocks, connected by an open iron staircase and double iron doors. Built of load-bearing brick, with a facing of soft red brick, its façade of giant Tuscan pilasters and round-headed window recesses complemented the entrance buildings on St John Street. The fermenting house was connected with the main brewery building in the middle of the site (now demolished) by an iron and steel bridge. A short section of the bridge has been preserved as a ‘feature’ in the landscaped area in front of the fermenting house.
After the brewery’s closure the fermenting house was used for warehousing, and latterly by Christie’s as an exhibition space. It was restored and refurbished in 1999–2000 by the architects Finch Forman, and is now the London headquarters of the architects BDP (Building Design Partnership).
Since 2001 the remainder of the site has been redeveloped as housing, initially to a scheme conceived by the Dutch architect Erick van Egeraat, who himself designed an office block for the north end of the site. A compatriot, Easchus Huckson, was to have designed the landscaping. Egeraat’s offices, intended to be draped in a flexible stainless-steel mesh which would have revealed the structure beneath like a ‘lifting skirt’, were ultimately not built. The architects Hamilton Associates carried out the first phase of the redevelopment, Brewery Square, which was completed in 2002 and comprises apartments and town-houses grouped around a courtyard.
The main elevations have a modular arrangement of pre-cast units clad in copper, zinc and glass. The development of the site continues at the time of writing (2007), with plans by the property company Carrot Ltd for a five-storey mixed-use building to comprise one- and two-bedroom apartments with offices and retail space.”
Julia Upton 