When a pint of Eltham Ale cost 2½d and came from our own brewery ......... Eltham in 1874

I often wonder just what a pint of Eltham Ale would have tasted like.

It was brewed buy our own Eltham Brewery and would have cost 2½d  back in 1874.

According to their advert published in the October of that year they offered  twelve different ales stouts and porter and delivered across south east London and beyond which included Woolwich Charlton and out to Belvedere and Erith, and up to Peckham, New Cross and Brixton.

The old brewery had been up the High Street behind the Carpenters Arms and later moved to a spot just down from St John’s Church.

Eltham Brewery, 1917

Now I might be wrong but there seems to be little written about the brewery.

There is a reference to the old one in Mr Gregory’s book and another in Eltham in the Making and just two pictures which appear in other books.*

All of which is a bit odd given that it must have employed quite a few of our residents and supplied a decent number of pubs.

Of course Greenwich Heritage Centre is bound to to have something on it and in due course I shall go looking in their archives.

That said there will be someone who can put me right on the exact date it moved and more importantly when it ceased business.

It was still there in 1920 and six years earlier had been owned by the Kenward Brothers all of which promises a rich field of research.

Well we shall see.

Pictures, advert Eltham Brewery, 1874, from Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History, http://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Eltham_Brewery, and the brewery in 1917, GRW 215, http://boroughphotos.org/greenwich/ courtesy of Greenwich Heritage Centre, http://www.greenwichheritage.org/site/index.php

*The Story of Royal Eltham, RR C Gregory, 1909, Eltham in the Making, 1990, Eltham, A PIctoral History, John Kennet, Eltham Through Time, Kristian Bedford, 2013