Thrale/Thrall history

Anchor Brewery, Southwark, Surrey, England

Tree: UK Thrale family

Notes:

Location

The brewery was situated in a 9-acre compound in Southwark, with:

• clerks’ quarters;
• storehouses;
• vaults and vats;
• stabling and dung pits for nearly 100 horses.

The address was Deadmans Place, so called because of the pest houses established there during the great plague. It was near Bandyleg Walk, Dirty Lane, The Naked Boy, The Clink, Frying Pan Alley and St. Mary Overy’s Dock. Next door was was a noisy and dusty stonecutter’s yard. Behind lay an old burial ground, and behind that, an open sewer. Then there were the tanneries and Messrs Potts’s vinegar factory. Mixed in were odd patches of open space locals used as tenter ground for stretching cloth.

Map of Anchor Brewery in 1875..

The whole area was subject to flooding. Over the road was Clink Street, handy for the Clink Prison, described at the time as…

a very gloomy hole.

… and …

London’s scrap heap, the refuge of its excluded occupations and its rejected residents.

Maid Lane, which joined Deadmans Place at the river end in 1751, was…

A long straggling place with ditches on either side; the passages to the houses being over little bridges.¹

By 1810, the site had expanded to almost 14 acres with the greatest production of beer worldwide.

Brewery House

Brewery House, or Borough House, was a four-storey building located at the entrance of the cobbled brew yard of Thrale’s Anchor Brewery. One of Henry Thrale’s residences, mainly used by Henry, Hester, thier children and Dr. Samuel Johnson during the winter months.

Brewery House in 1833.

Now known as 21 and 23 Park Street Southwark, London. The dilapidated building, which at one point was used as council housing was sold by Southwark Council in 2013 for £2.96 million - making it the:

most expensive council house in the UK.

'Brewery House, 21-23 Park Street Southwark in June 2024 (half the house frontage is obscured by the tree).

'Brewery House', 21-23 Park Street, Southwark, London, 4 June 2024.

Timeline

Year	Years	Owner	Note
1616-1657	41	James Monger	Established
1657-1670	13	James Monger (the Younger)
1670-1696	26	James Child
1696-1729	33	Edmund Halsey
1729-1758	29	Ralph Thrale, t/a Thrale & Company
1758-1781	23	Henry Thrale, t/a H. Thrale & Company Limited
1781-1798	17	Barclay Perkins & Company, t/a Thrale & Company	Continued to trade under name 'Thrale & Co'
1895- 9 May 1955	60	Barclay Perkins & Company, t/a Barclay Perkins	'Thrale & Co' trading name retired.
15 July 1955		Courage, Barclay & Company Limited	Brewing ceased at the Bankside site, and was relocated to Courage in Bermondsey, London.

Production

On 21 January 1780 Hester wrote in Thraliana…

We shall brew but Sixty Thousand Barrels of Beer this Year! pretty Times indeed; and Mr Smelt saying he wishes we had more Taxes, & the King more power: I wish the King would put an End to this destructive War I’m sure; the Year before last we brew’d 96,000 Barrels—last Year only 76,000, & this Winter we shall scarece turn 60,000. So horribly is the Consumption lessened by the War.

Year	Barrels	Owner
1750	46,100	Ralph Thrale
1758	32,622
1760	30,000	Henry Thrale. One of the top ten porter brewers in London.
1777	85,287
1778	96,000
1779	76,000
1780	60,000
1782	85,700
1802	137,463	Barclay & Perkins
1809	260,000
1810	200,000
1815	330,000
1826	380,180
1867	423,000

Contemporary use

Now, it is part of a wider area called Bankside which is a strip of land running along the River Thames, comprising:

• a river walk;
• Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre; and
• the Tate Modern.

Footnotes

London and Its Environs Described. Robert Dodsley, 1751.↩︎

Address : Latitude: 51.5081292, Longitude: -0.09518690000004426