As the glasses clink this Christmas and New Year it's a good time to look at Ram Quarter's unique past. Shire horses and lorries alike once carted barrels of beer from the site to be enjoyed all over the borough and more widely around the country. Ram Quarter’s heritage is woven into the redevelopment, and Greenland’s careful transformation of the site always sought to celebrate the best of the site's history while also looking to the future.
An example of this was the preservation of one of the listed buildings on site, the one now known as the Old Brewer's House - the oldest building at Ram Quarter - which marks its 300th birthday this year. To celebrate let's take a foray into the historical records and open a window into the development's past.
Plumb line and trowel in hand, bricklayer John Porter got to work building the house in 1724. The building has been in continuous use ever since, and now serves as Greenland's on-site office at Ram Quarter, the company's redevelopment of the former Young's Brewery. The structure of the building has been largely preserved over time, but the house has seen its fair share of change as it now enters its fourth century since construction.
The house was built for the Draper family, possibly as a Wandle-side family home. During the Victorian era, a ground floor reception area and kitchen were added to the building. Changes in the housing plans over the years hint at the possibility that the building was partially affected and rebuilt because of the brewery fires of 1832 and 1882.
Bearing these scars, the house transformed once again. The top floor, formerly servants' quarters, had been converted by the 1980s into a company flat for Young's. This was around the time that director Thomas Young was settling into his ground floor office, and a post room had been set up in the former reception area.
But in spite of these changes, a remarkable amount of the history of Old Brewer's House remains. The ground floor still displays ornate medallions illustrating architects Inigo Jones and Andreas Palladio. These are thought to have been carved by Italian craftsmen in the early eighteenth century. Before coming to Wandsworth, the medallions had been in a large house in Wimbledon. When the South Sea Bubble burst - in the terrible financial crash of 1720 - the medallions' Wimbledon owner was forced to sell, and the medallions made their way to their present location.
Old Brewer's House is far from alone in preserving the history of Ram Quarter. The name of the site itself is drawn from The Ram Inn, which was named in the early 1500s after Ram Field. The site of the former field is roughly where the Town Hall stands today, a hundred yards to the east of Ram Quarter. The street between Ram Quarter and the Town Hall is Ram Street.
As for the brewery at Ram Quarter, it too was first documented under the 'Ram' name in 1533, more than half a century before the Spanish Armada, and before even Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries. Greenland has maintained the unbroken brewing tradition to this day, and the site remains the UK's longest continuously-operating brewery. In a neat quirk, Sambrook's - the commercial brewer which took over the mantle following Young's departure - is also London's oldest independent brewery. Sambrook's serves its famous beer on site in its popular bar and taproom which has established itself as an integral part of the local entertainment scene.
Happy 300th birthday to Old Brewer's House - may the next 300 years of Ram Quarter be as successful!
authored by the Greenland team