There is a particular kind of Saturday morning that only ever follows a Friday night organised with military precision. I met one this weekend, and I should report at the outset that I have not attempted anything this ambitious since university.
The occasion was the Bermondsey Beer Mile, arranged by Sean Molony, Liveryman and Court Assistant of the Innholders’ Company, who brought a dozen of his own Company along and has plainly done this before. We began at the Southwark Brewing Company on Druid Street at half past six, to a timetable that made allowance for beers being off and bars being shut. The timetable held. What follows, though, is rather more about the arches than the running order — because the arches are the reason any of it is there at all.
The Mile runs beneath the viaduct that carries the railway out of London Bridge — built between 1834 and 1836 for the London and Greenwich Railway, the first steam railway to have a terminus in the capital, and lifted clear of the streets on 878 brick arches, still the longest run in Britain. The men laying those bricks believed they were building a railway. They were also building the better part of two centuries’ worth of cheap, dry, well-ventilated industrial space.
Which matters, because Southwark once brewed on a scale that is hard to picture now. The Anchor Brewery stood on Bankside from 1616, and by 1781 it belonged to the estate of the late Henry Thrale. At the sale that May, Samuel Johnson — an executor, and plainly enjoying himself — told the bidders they were not there to buy a parcel of boilers and vats.
He was not exaggerating: by 1809 it was the largest brewery in the world. And then it was not. Barclay Perkins had stopped brewing by the early 1970s and came down in 1981; Courage closed its Horselydown brewhouse the same year. The borough that had housed the largest brewery on earth was left without one of any consequence.
It stayed that way for the better part of thirty years, until in September 2009 a cheesemonger from Neal’s Yard Dairy — lately back from New York, where he had noticed people talking about beer the way his colleagues talked about cheese — rented an arch on Druid Street and called it The Kernel. The rent was low because nobody else wanted railway arches. Others noticed: Brew By Numbers in 2012, Anspach & Hobday in 2013, and in 2014 the Southwark Brewing Company, where we had started on Friday.
My thanks to Sean Molony for organising it, and to the Worshipful Company of Innholders for the invitation. Sean was also one of the two who kindly put my name forward for election in June, so I owe him a good deal more than one evening in Bermondsey.
The Mile lies outside my jurisdiction. The 180-odd establishments on the pub map do not, and I am reliably informed they are all still exactly where I left them.