Essay30 August 2026 · Great Baddow · Essex pubs

Ghosts of Baddow Brewery

There is a modern echo too. Chelmsford Brew Co now brews on Brewery Fields, a stone’s throw from the old brewing ground. The ghosts come first.

At 47 Church Street in Great Baddow stands The Old Brewery: the surviving shell of Baddow Brewery, a local brewing business whose story runs from the late eighteenth century through to the age of tied houses, consolidation and closure. The building is Grade II listed.

The headline history is simple enough. Baddow Brewery was founded in 1798 by a Mr Crabb. In 1866 Frederick and Arthur Veley came in as partners — later joined by Thomas Smee — and the firm ran as Crabb, Veley & Company until 1887. Two years after the Veleys arrived, in 1868, a new brewery was built to designs by George Scamell, a specialist brewery architect who had worked on Truman, Hanbury & Buxton's London plant earlier in the decade. From 1902 it was chaired by Reginald Watney, of the Watney brewing family, until his death in 1923. In 1927 it was acquired by Seabrook, and brewing at Great Baddow came to an end. Local oral history has fingered a specific culprit for the sale: the founder's three granddaughters, all staunch Temperance movement members.

But the more interesting story is not just the brewery building. It is the network.

The answer: 30 still appear to be trading

After working through the estate pub by pub, the current working count is:

That gives us a beautifully clean, slightly melancholy headline: of Baddow Brewery’s 61 listed pubs, 30 still appear to be trading. Not always under the same name. Not always with the same interior, ownership or beer. But still serving as pubs, bars, inns, hotels or pub-restaurants.

*Method note: “Open” includes renamed pubs, free houses, hotel bars and pub-restaurants such as Harvester — not only traditional wet-led locals.

Another 29 have ceased trading as pubs. Two remain unknown because the evidence is too thin to call honestly.

The survivors

The living half of the estate is the joy of the thing. But the names alone are not the story. The transformations are.

That is why the count matters. Baddow Brewery is dead as a brewery company, but its estate has not vanished. Half of it is still visible in the modern pub map; the other half survives as restaurants, shops, houses, names, rumours and awkward gaps in the record.

The changed and the gone

Some former Baddow houses survive physically but no longer function as pubs. Some are restaurants, shops, homes, holiday lets or housing developments. Some appear to be simply closed. Some have left only a name in a directory and a stubborn gap on the map.

Sugar Hut deserves the spotlight here. The White Hart at Brentwood did not survive as a pub, but as Essex’s TOWIE nightclub it became something almost as map-defining: a former Baddow tied house reborn as reality-TV shorthand. The Bull at Pitsea gave its name to Bull Mews housing. That is what the gone half looks like too: not just disappearance, but mutation.

The two unknowns

The two awkward entries are Gardeners Arms, Kelvedon and New Inn, Pitsea.

Gardeners Arms is troublesome because ClosedPubs’ Kelvedon list and PubWiki both give fairly full Kelvedon lost-pub lists, and neither has a Gardeners Arms. Until a street, licensee or tithe entry turns up, it remains a name on a brewery list rather than a pinned house. New Inn, Pitsea is similarly polluted by other Essex New Inns, and the historic address is not yet nailed down tightly enough. So they stay unknown — not a failure of the map, but the map being honest.

Baddow brews again — but carefully

Chelmsford Brew Co now brews in Great Baddow. Their own account says the site had to be Brewery Fields, the landscape of the original Great Baddow brewery in the 1800s. CAMRA’s visit write-up placed them only a stone’s throw from the old Baddow Brewery, and the early BlueShack story has exactly the right local-brewery texture: family, garden-shed brewing, recipes getting out of hand.

Chelmsford’s current brewing scene is wider than one brewery — Radio City Beer Works and Brewhouse & Kitchen are part of it too — but the Great Baddow geography matters.

Not the same company. Not the old brewery building. But new beer on old brewing soil.