In the same period the breweries had become one of the wonders of London, one of the sights to which foreign visitors were directed. By the 1830s there were twelve principal brewers, producing, according to Charles Knight’s London, “two barrels, or 76 gallons, of beer per annum for every inhabitant of the metropolis-man, woman and child.” Who would not want to observe all this industry and enterprise? One German visitor was impressed by the “vast establishment” of Whitbread’s brewery in Chiswell Street, with its buildings “higher than a church” and its horses “the giants of their breed.” In similar fashion, in the summer of 1827, a German prince “turned my ‘cab’ to Barclay’s brewery, in Park Street, Southwark, which the vastness of its dimensions renders almost romantic.” He observed that steam engines drove the machinery which manufactured from twelve to fifteen thousand barrels a day; ninety-nine of the larger barrels, each one “as high as a house,” are kept in “gigantic sheds”; 150 horses “like elephants” transport the beer. His awareness of the size and immensity of London are here reflected in its capacity for beer and, in a final parallel, he notes that from the roof of the brewery “you have a very fine panoramic view of London.”
That emblematic significance was recognised by painters as well as visitors, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century there was established what London art historians have termed “the brewery genre.” Ten years after the prince’s visit, for example, Barclay’s brewery was painted by an anonymous hand; the entrance is depicted, together with the thriving life of London all around it. To the right is the great brewhouse, with a suspension bridge connecting to the other side of the street. In the foreground a butcher’s boy, in the blue apron typical of his trade, stands with another customer beside a baked-potato van; barrels of beer on sleds are being drawn by horses into the yard, passing a dray which is just leaving. In the street, to the right, a hansom cab is bringing in more visitors. It is a picture of appetite, with the meat carried on the shoulders of the butcher’s boy as an apt token of the London diet, as well as of immense energy and industry.
But there are other ways of conveying the immensity of the city’s drinking. Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré visited the same premises for their London: a Pilgrimage-“the town of Malt and Hops” as Jerrold called it in 1871-in order to see the brewing of the beer named Entire which assuaged “Thirsty London.” Jerrold noted that against the great towers and barrels the working men “look like flies,” and indeed in Doré’s engravings these dark anonymous shapes tend to their beer-mashing and beer-making duties like votaries; all is in shadow and chiaroscuro, with fitful gleams illuminating the activities of these small figures in vast enclosed spaces. Here again the life of the city is like that within some great decaying prison, with the metal pipes and cylinders as its bars and gates. Jerrold, like the German visitor before him, looked over London “with St. Paul’s dominating the view from the north,” and apostrophises beer as the city’s sacred drink. “We are,” he remarked, “upon classic ground.”
The gin palace was supplanted by the public house which was the direct descendant of the tavern and the alehouse. Of course taverns survived in the older parts of London, known to their adherents for privacy and quiet, to their detractors for gloom and silence. Public houses continued the tradition of segregation, with saloon, lounge and private bars being distinguished from public bars and jug and bottle departments. Many pubs were not salubrious, with plain and dirty interiors and a long “zinc-topped” counter where men sat solemnly drinking-“You enter by a heavy door that is held ajar by a thick leather strap … striking you in the back as you go in and often knocking off your hat.” Instead of the gin palace’s long bar, the public house bar was characteristically in the shape of a horseshoe with the variously coloured bottles rising up within its interior space. The furniture was plain enough, with chairs and benches, tables and spittoons, upon a sawdusted floor. By 1870 there were some 20,000 public houses and beer-shops in the metropolis, catering to half a million customers each day, reminiscent of “dusty, miry, smoky, beery, brewery London.”
