The text below has sat on my computer, in more-or-less the form in which I am now posting it, for more than five years. I had planned to make this part of a wider project that included things other than a straight-forward history of the brewery, and I do worry this might be a little dry. But I do occasionally I get emails about Guildford's now-defunct Friary Brewery, presumably because my blog is one of few sources to come up in a Google search, which makes me think it would be better to just get this information out there. So, here is everything I could find out about the Friary Brewery.
Guildford is a weird place. It’s not a new town: the first known references to it are in the will of Alfred the Great. But it often feels like a new town: the unglamorous, unattractive, post-war kind that Radio 4 comedians make disparaging jokes about. Walk out of the train station and you’re confronted with a grim spaghetti of roads and underpasses, sympathetic only to cars. It’s the sort of place where, to cross the road, you need to wait at three or four pelican crossings. What awaits on the other side is a bland shopping centre: the Friary.
It would be lovely to think that the Friary shopping centre was named after the brewery it replaced, but this is not the case. In fact, both businesses took their name from a distant former occupant of the site - a medieval monastery. The monastic house existed from some time in the late 13th century until 1538.i I’m not sure what was done with the space between then and 1865, when Thomas Taunton established the Friary Brewery. This enterprise was originally a partnership with his brother Silas, but he left in 1873 and Thomas went into business with Charles Hoskin Master, at which point the brewery site in Guildford was occupied. Master subsequently bought the business outright. ii
Beginning a continual process of absorbing other local breweries, Master acquired Holryods of Byfleet in 1889 and it was in this year that he first officially registered the business. A further acquisition, Healys in Chertsey, was made the next year. The company name was officially updated to Friary, Holroyd & Healy’s in 1895iii, but continued to be generally known as ‘Friary’.
The Guildford brewery was an important local employer and the brewery also played other community roles. Aside from a football team, Friary Brewery Athletic, and a well-regarded brass band, the cellars were used as air raid shelter in the First World Wariv. In 1920 the company saved the nearby Pewley Down from development by buying 22 acres it as a gift to the town. It is now a nature reserve.v
In 1956, Friary, Holroyd & Healy’s merged with London’s Meux brewery, probably best known as the site of an accident known as the Great Beer Flood at its Horseshoe Brewery in 1814 in which a porter huge porter vat burst, killing eight people and injuring many more.vi Five years later, Friary Meux went into liquidation, and was taken over by Allied Breweries in 1964.vii
Brewing at the Guildford site ceased on 23rd January 1969viii and production of the Friary Meux beers was moved to the brewery in Romford where Ind Coope, another Allied brand, operated.ix The Guildford brewery was demolished in 1973. In 1978 Allied merged with food manufacturers J. Lyons and Co. to form Allied Lyons.x
After a wilderness period, Allied revived the Friary Meux brand in 1980.xi Their motive was probably to disguise the fact they were a faintly evil mega-corporation by spreading their output over the brand names of breweries they had acquired. Thomas Walker, another defunct Allied acquisition, got the same treatment.xii In February 1981’s ‘London Drinker’, an anonymous “mole” revealed that the beers brewed at Romford Allied brewery were paired, with different brand names used for the same beer. Friary Meux Bitter was, they say, exactly the same as Benskin’s Bitter.xiii Obviously this information can’t be strictly verified but the hint of espionage about the whole thing is quite exciting.
Allied Lyons merged with Carlsberg in 1992, becoming Carlsberg-Tetley – now Carlsberg UK.xiv The brand was used into the 1990s, and it seems production of cask beer continued. An edition of the Reading Evening Post from 1997 contains an advert for a real ale-focused pub, The Plough in Tilehurst, who boast “ale pulled by hand from the cask, just as nature intended”, and lists Friary Meux as one of its regular fixturesxv. Exactly when the use of the brand fizzled out isn’t clear, and indeed it may not have vanished entirely. The most recent sighting I’m aware of is a bizarre one – a ‘smooth bitter’ on keg in a discount pub in Woking called The Pound. Blogger Ed Wray, who made this discovery in 2016, called this an example of “neo-retro” branding – an old name attached to a new product, likely never produced whilst Friary Meux was a going concern.xvi
