Demolition of the Mile End Brewery
Demolition of Charrington & Co. Ltd, Mile End Brewery
by
Jack McD Whitaker
I had an office on a first floor corner of what I think was known as the Hoare Block. This had a view across the road to The Hayfield but also across part of the brewery site to a boiler house and its huge chimney. I had always been interested in photography.
Brewing at Mile End ceased in early 1975 and the company started to demolish the brewery in January 1976. I was fascinated by the swinging metal ball which was being used to knock down the buildings outside my office so I took some photos and showed them to my boss, Bob Watson, who was then Finance Director. He showed them to David Medd, Property Director, and it was suddenly realised that we were knocking down a 219 year old brewery of which we had no photographic record, as far as we knew.
As a result it was suggested that I should continue to take photos of as much of the demolition as possible, bearing in mind that I still had a finance job to do!
I started to take photos in January 1976 and the last one of demolition was taken in October 1976. From that photo and, looking at my photos of the building of the new office block, it’s clear that there was still a lot of demolition to be done of buildings at the rear of the site.
I don’t remember when the demolition of the rest of the buildings took place and I’m surprised I didn’t carry on with that. In October I would have been pre-occupied with the year end accounts and when the new building started I may have been more interested in that - so those may have been reasons for a lack of subsequent demolition photos.
One of the most interesting bits of demolition for me was the removal of the enormous boiler house chimney. The steeplejacks had to build a rather flimsy looking ladder fixed to the side of the chimney which they had to climb each morning. They then started to demolish from inside the top with some pretty large chunks of masonry falling outside for its full height - a rather dangerous operation I thought because of other work going on at ground level.
They subsequently removed it brick by brick from scaffolding on the outside with material being dropped down inside the chimney. This operation took two men a month and a half to complete.
In 1977 work started on a new office block. Staff had been re-housed in various buildings at the back of the site and also in rented offices in Bow, while the demolition was going on. I continued my photography and the production of photo prints for Peter Mitchell, Chief Quantity Surveyor, to use at his regular progress meetings with the builders. Looking at the dates of the photographs it looks as though we had moved into the new offices by September 1978.
Part of the brewery buildings on the corner of Mile End Road and Cephas Avenue, which had been used as offices (including a beer room for staff in the early days of my employment!) is a listed building and, according to Wikipedia, is now owned by a firm of solicitors and is known as Adams House.
The neighbouring building, which used to be known as the Directors’ House is used for residential purposes. There was also a four storey tenement building which was listed but didn’t survive the trauma of losing the supporting buildings either side of it. There was also a set of four or five similar buildings which I think were also listed and I suspect that they may still be in existence - I shall have to go and check.
The new offices, together with a new restaurant and leisure centre for the staff which were built at the rear of the site after the completion of the new office building, did not last long though as the whole site was sold and redeveloped into the Anchor Retail Park. I don’t know exactly when this happened but it was probably around 2008.
Taking down the boiler house chimney and the Mile End Road frontage of the old brewery