The southeast part of the present day Seven Dials and Covent Garden Conservation Areas, including the triangles between Shorts Gardens and Earlham Street, and Mercer Street and Shelton Street, as well as the Mercers’ estate south of Shelton Street on either side of Langley Street, is in its present form substantially a creation of the brewing industry. Although brewing ceased over a century ago, the buildings have nearly all survived and still have a commanding presence in the Conservation Area.

A brewery was established in 1740 on a site between Long Acre and Shelton Street (then Castle Street), named the Woodyard Brewery after its founder Thomas Shackle who was a timber merchant. After his death, it was owned for a time by Mr. Gyfford. In 1787 the brewery was acquired by a partnership headed by Harvey Christian Combe, MP, Alderman and sometime Lord Mayor of London. It remained a Combe family business till 1898 when it was amalgamated with Watney and Co. and Reid & Co. to form Watney, Combe, Reid & Co.

By the late nineteenth century, the brewery buildings had expanded northwards as far as Shorts Gardens and covered an area of four acres; the firm by then employed 450 people and produced 500,000 barrels of beer a year and was one of the largest industries in the Covent Garden area and the second most productive brewery in London.

Many of the brewery buildings were reconstructed between 1880 and 1886. The parish rate books, for instance, record that properties in Queen Street (now the site of Shorts Gardens) were demolished in 1882.

The following year five freehold properties in Earl Street (now Earlham Street) were acquired by Combe & Co., and also demolished.

The new stables occupying these two sites were completed by 1886. Nos. 41 and 43 were rebuilt as stores by Combe & Co. in 1880-2. Much of the main quadrangle, south of Shelton Street, was rebuilt between 1876 and 1882 to the design of E. J. Wilson, architect, at a cost of £50,000 following the renewal of the lease from the Mercers’ Co. in November 1876.

The whole brewery in its completed form is described in some detail in Alfred Barnard’s Noted Breweries of Great Britain and Ireland 1889).

The original brewery building was erected by Harvey Christian Combe circa 1790 and is recorded in a painting of the Brew House Yard in 1798 by the horse-painter Sartorius. Though heightened, this building remained the nucleus of the Brewery as reconstructed in the 1880s with ‘noble blocks of London stock brick’ connected above the streets by elegant cast iron bridges and below ground by three acres of subterranean store houses.

Brewhouse Yard, south of Shelton Street, contained the Brew House, the Malthouse, the Fermenting Department and the administrative offices, all on an heroic scale. The large hall in the Brew House was 240 feet long and ninety feet wide. The Malt Measuring Room formed a gallery 171 feet long and 52 feet wide. The malt stores themselves were tubs 50 feet deep filled from the top, the malt being hauled from street level by cranes. The Brewery had three wells of its own, bored 522 feet deep into the chalk to produce water suitable for brewing. It also consumed 57,356,000 gallons of water a year from the new River Supply in the 1890s.

The triangle containing No. 24 Shelton Street and Nos. 25-33 Earlham Street was occupied by the Ice Machine House for cooling the porter. It contained a ‘Pontifex-Reece Ammonia Ice Machine’ as well as a 25 horsepower Boulton and Watt steam engine to drive the machinery and the Brewery’s own building department (masons and bricklayers) on the ground floor.

Nos. 29-43 Earlham Street and 8-20 Shorts Gardens, as rebuilt between 1880 and 1886, comprised the stables with stalls for 121 horses arranged on two levels around a stone­paved inner yard. In materials and design, all these buildings are characteristic of the brewery tradition in architecture which hardly changed through the nineteenth century. The austere brick facades are enlivened only by thin brick string courses, stone window cills, segmental gauged arches, and minimal crowning cornice. The interior construction with cast iron columns, riveted beams and jack arches is equally consistent. The courtyards are robustly paved with granite setts and stone flags.

In its heyday the Brewery was much visited by English and foreign royalty and other notables who considered it a spectacular example of a large industrial undertaking, unequalled on the Continent of Europe. Harvey Christian Combe, in particular, was a great showman. A man of intelligence as well as business capacity, he was a Whig and member of Brooks’s Club, a friend of Sheridan’s and Beau Brummel’s. On 7 June 1807 he gave at the brewery a much publicised ‘Royal Brewhouse Dinner’ which was attended by the Duke and Duchess of York and the Duke of Cambridge who, after touring the premises, sat down to a repast of rump steaks grilled on malt shovels by the brewery staff, washed down with Combe’s porter. As late as 1888 Prince Oscar of Sweden paid a special visit to the brewery while staying in London.

In 1905 Watney Combe Reid closed the Covent Garden premises in order to concentrate production at its Mortlake Brewery. The old buildings in Seven Dials were not demolished, however, but mainly converted to warehouses. Adaptation works included the installation of new floors and staircases.

The blocks south of Shelton Street were taken over by fruit and vegetable wholesalers as they were convenient for Covent Garden Market. By 1930 most of them were occupied by T. J. Poupart Ltd., fruit salesmen at Covent Garden Market. In 1930 Poupart’s were granted a new fifty year lease of the premises for an annual rent of £6,000.

The stable block in Earlham Street became a box factory for Messrs. J. Lyons & Co. (whose name can still be seen above the archway at No. 37 Earlham Street). No. 33 Shelton Street became the works of Smith & Leppard, Printers, and was part reconstructed for them in 1906. Externally some of the storage apparatus, used by both the Brewery and the later warehouses, still survives, notably the hoists and hoist doors in the flanks of the Earlham Street and Shelton Street buildings.

Dr John Martin Robinson