Tag: BFI

The collection of documentaries about pubs from the British Film Institute we’ve been eagerly awaiting for some time has finally arrived, and our copy turned up this week. (We bought it with our own money, for the record.)

Quite apart from the aching nostalgia for an age before we born provoked by the faded films, there are lots of nuggets which demand further research.

For example, there’s the Runcorn mega brewery mentioned in A Round of Bass (dir. Geoffrey Reeve, 1972). We’ve been to Runcorn several times and never noticed any sign of the ‘most modern beer producing plant in Europe’. A quick Google turned up this academic paper (PDF) by David W Gutzke which summarises the story as follows:

Built by Bass Charrington, Britain’s pre-eminent brewery in the 1960s and 1970s, Runcorn was conceived as becoming western Europe’s largest brewery. Even before it opened in 1974, however, Runcorn was struck with paralysing labour disruptions, technological problems, and managerial miscalculations that would plague its history until its closure until 1991. What gave Runcorn broader significance was its role in reflecting the pervasive, but misplaced, assumptions about a new corporate culture, new technologies, the emergence of national brands, and advertising as a vehicle for replacing local consumer tastes with national markets.

The paper is an interesting beer-focused companion piece to Andy Beckett’s When the Lights Went Out and answers the riddle of why we didn’t spot any sign of a monstrously huge brewery on our trips to Cheshire:

Soon the entire brewery plant was dismantled and sold, with some of it shipped to Romania; Bass even disposed of the empty brewing site. Nothing remained to remind the company of a scheme so grandiose but so calamitous that its true nature was expunged from Bass’s official histories.