We touched upon beer in a previous blog but it is not a subject to be passed over too lightly – not if you are a Burtonian at least.

It was about three hundred years ago that the combination of canals and breweries put Burton on the economic map in England. Following the construction of the River Trent Navigation and a wharf and other buildings in the area of the old Burton abbey in 1712, Burton developed in earnest as a major town for producing and exporting beer. The canal allowed Burton to ship beer to Hull and from there to the Baltic and Prussia. And when the Burton brewers learned how to replicate the pale ale in London, but using a better quality of water, they started producing India Pale Ale, so named because it would keep well on voyages to the sub-continent. By the mid-19th century, with a new rail link to Liverpool, Burton was in a position to export all over the British Empire.

At the height of its brewing success one quarter of all the beer sold in Britain was produced in Burton on Trent. There were more than 30 breweries recorded in 1880, dominated by the newly much-enlarged Bass brewery, then known as Bass, Ratcliff & Gretton, which occupied the large site on the High Street, a site once famous for numerous chimneys emitting an almost permanent smog over the town. William Bass set up in Burton at the building now known as Bass Town House in 1777 and soon developed a highly successful business.

If you have a chance to visit the offices fronting the Bass Buildings on the High Street you will feel transported back in time as little of its architectural interior has changed. The stone plinths at the bottom of the stairways are carved with motifs showing hops and barley. The old boardroom door, at balcony level, still admits to a boardroom – once the strategic core of a great brewing dynasty.

Today, as we negotiate the old and the new – represented at Nicholas Humphreys by a range of properties in and around Burton – we can all be proud of just how much the town developed, and the heritage it left us in its public and private buildings and landmarks, all because of beer.

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