Place Name
Barnes and Mortlake had a number of malthouses. C Marshall Rose in Nineteenth Century Mortlake and East Sheen writes: “In addition to the brewery, malting was an important local industry, being ancillary to the brewing of beer. Its importance may be judged from the fact that in 1791 a malthouse was built on one of the wharves at a cost of £1,400, a considerable sum in those days.” This road takes its name from the malthouse owned by John Moody in the late 18th and early 19th centuries Mary Grimwade and Charles Hailstone in the Highways and Byways of Barnes write: “The malthouse is depicted with a wide arched central door and a characteristic cowl above the roof in Leigh’s Panorama of The Thames, c 1830. It was one of three malthouses in Back Lane.” Between 1830 and 1865 the owner was Henry Downs who had a large malting business at Richmond. He was in turn succeeded by Henry Walmsley and later by Hockaday and Alderson. By 1884 the malthouse was the Riverside Brewery of Todd & Company. This however was a short-lived venture, because by 1910 the building was being used as a venue for early cinematography presentations although plans to convert it into a cinema came to nothing. Instead it returned to industry, as the foundry of the the Barnes Aluminium and Bronze Company. Grimwade and Hailstone describe its demise: “All vestiges of the old malthouse went in 1950 with then rebuilding of The Terrace front and the insertion of factory windows. On the 1968 OS it was marked as Brass Foundry. In 1981 the boundary was pulled down and Maltings Close built in its place in a style consonant with the period architecture of The Terrace.”
