Guinness Park Royal (Diageo)

For the planned Guinness central London brewpub, see Guinness at Old Brewers Yard.

Closed brewery
Lakeside Drive, Park Royal NW10 7HQ (Ealing)
guinness.com
First sold beer: 1936 (at this site)
Ceased brewing: 2005 (at this site, still brewing outside London)

Guinness is of course an Irish brewery but its early history was strongly shaped by London brewing at a time when Britain ruled Ireland. Arthur Guinness had a share in a brewery in Leixlip/Léim an Bhradáin, County Kildare, from around 1755, and in 1759 set up his own brewery in the Irish capital, Dublin/Baile Átha Cliath, famously taking out a 9,000 year lease on a site at St James’s Gate where the brewery still operates today.

Originally the simple ale styles of the day were brewed, but in 1778, Guinness began producing porter in direct competition with imported London beers which were gaining in popularity in Dublin. It was likely not the first Irish brewery to do so but ultimately the most successful.

By the mid-19^th century Guinness was one of the biggest brewers in the British Isles, successfully transforming porter and stout (the latter originally simply a stronger porter), into something characteristically Irish. The fame of Irish stout, and of Guinness in particular, spread across the world with the Irish diaspora, making it one of the first global brands, and by 1914 St James’s Gate was producing an astonishing 4.34 million hl a year.

By the 1930s, with Dublin now the capital of an independent state and English porter heading inexorably towards extinction, mainland Britain was one of Guinness’s most important export markets. While customers in the northwest and Scotland were easily reached by ship from Dublin, the south of England was less accessible, so, having considered and rejected a Manchester site, Guinness added a satellite brewery in London.

The location chosen was Park Royal in Willesden, a former Royal Agricultural Society showground in the western suburbs on the A40 trunk road which was then being redeveloped as an industrial zone. Guinness built a massive state-of-the-art facility with a capacity of more than 715,000 hl a year, designed in art deco style by George Gilbert Scott, noted for Bankside Power Station (now the Tate Modern) among other buildings, and Alexander Gibb. Centered on three interconnected 30 m-high blocks, and with extensive private railway sidings, it won praise from renowned architecture critic Nikolaus Pevsner as an antidote to ‘the exuberance of contemporary bypass Art Deco’.

For a while after it opened in 1936, it restored to London the long-lost distinction of being home to the biggest brewery in the world. It turned out to be last new brewery in the capital before the arrival of modern microbrewing in the late 1970s.

Originally Park Royal brewed only Guinness Extra Stout, then at around 5.5%, in draught and bottle-conditioned form. Following various flavour matching and blending trials with Dublin-brewed Guinness, the company ceased shipping the latter to London, with southeast England entirely supplied from Park Royal from 1938. The draught stout was pasteurised and pressurised by the 1950s, but bottled Guinness remained a live product until 1994.

Unlike other historic industrial British brewers, Guinness never pursued a policy of acquiring a pub estate, instead relying on the distinctiveness of its beer and the strength of its brand to ensure it became a ‘must-stock’ in pubs owned by other brewers. For decades it often strengthened its partnerships with potential competitors by selling its beer in bulk for other brewers to bottle for sale in their own outlets.

Park Royal’s output peaked at 3.3 million hl a year in 1972, but it continued to produce substantial quantities for many more decades. In 1978 a new lager plant opened, primarily to brew Harp Lager (around 3.5%), a brand it launched in Ireland in 1960, brewed at the Great Northern Brewery in Dundalk, and began marketing in the UK in partnership with Courage and Scottish & Newcastle the following year. Harp was first brewed at Park Royal in the early 1960s, while a dedicated brewery intended for it was under construction at Courage’s Alton site. In the 1980s the Park Royal lager facility also brewed a licensed version of Alsatian lager Kronenbourg 1664, early low alcohol lager Kaliber (0.5%) and a long-forgotten Guinness Bitter. In 1998 most lager production was contracted to Camerons in Hartlepool and the plant closed the next year.

Where are they now?

In 1997, Guinness merged with hotel, catering and spirits group Grand Metropolitan, which had sold off its own brewing interests in Watney (see Stag Brewery) six years previously, to form Diageo, one of the biggest drinks companies in the world. In 2005, with improvements at St James’s Gate, the London plant was deemed surplus to capacity and worth more as development land. It was summarily closed, with Guinness production for the UK market centralised in Dublin.

Draught, canned and bottled Guinness, now known as Guinness Original (4.2%), are of course still brewed in Dublin. Harp has disappeared from the mainland UK but is still available in Northern Ireland, also brewed in Dublin, as is Kaliber.

Despite its importance, the Park Royal brewery buildings were entirely demolished, among some controversy, in 2006. Following an application from the 20th Century Society, English Heritage (now succeeded by Historic England) recommended the building for listing, but this was overruled by the government.

Diageo retained its global headquarters in a more recent office block on the site at 1 Lakeside Drive NW10 7HQ until 2021, but has since relocated to a central London address.

Meanwhile, Guinness is set to return to brewing in London on a much smaller scale by the end of 2024 with the opening of Guinness at Old Brewers Yard in Covent Garden.

Things to see

This must be one of the most thoroughly effaced large breweries in London, entirely replaced by homes, business parks and green space. The original layout has been completely lost and it’s now very hard to work out the footprint, though the long, narrow lake that functions as a centrepiece of the new development more-or-less marks the western boundary. There aren’t even any street or business names to recall the earlier use.

Updated 21 May 2024.

More London breweries
Closed London breweries