Place Name
A large brewery – featured on Nicolas Lane’s map of the area from 1636 – stood to the east of Brewhouse Lane until about 1700. At one time the brewery is said to have been owned by Henry VIII’s chief minister Thomas Cromwell’s industrious father Walter, who owned a great many businesses in the area at around the turn of the 16thCentury (tradition has it that Thomas himself was born near Brewhouse Lane in 1485). We get some idea of the scale of the operation by the fact that in the 17thCentury it was supplying customers as far away as Battersea and Lambeth, perhaps more pertinently records show one Martin the Brewer was the third largest taxpayer in the parish.
