Mini-Blog - Part 2

I did promise to continue my non-Brentford travelogue, but in fact, it will turn into another endeavour.

A year or so ago, I had the idea of following (via a very scenic route) my friend Tom Levitt's lead in his book The Business of History, published last year. This was a kind of update of another book, written in 1925 by one William Beable called The Romance of Great Businesses. Beable selected 32 businesses on slightly eccentric criteria, and only 4 of them survived intact last year - Unilever (originally Lever Brothers), WH Smith (which has only survived 2026 by selling it's traditional business to a Private Equity Company and renaming it TG Jones - an invented name to sound a bit like WH Smith, makes me think of the old TV show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alias_Smith_and_Jones - GSK (though that was originally Glaxo and has now split into two companies with one half now called Haleon and now I believe completely separate with no GSK ownership) and BP as far as I can see was called the Anglo-Persian Oil Company back in 1925, though some Germans had called themselves BP early in the century and found their UK assets consicated after WW1. These assets ended up in Anglo-Persian.

You could reasonably argue that not one of those 32 had survived the century.

I really enjoyed Tom's book, but it also frustrated me. The 32 that Beable had selected missed many which interested me and included many I had no interest in, so I hatched an idea to update all this business analysis. So I made a list of the 100 companies which made up the FTSE 100 when it was launched in 1970. I started working on this in a vague way back in January and published a couple of blogs - Allied Lyons and Asda - back in January. Then I got busy with the election campaign, the victories we had as Greens and the upshot of that. Now I am back on an even keel and when I got to Heswall I thought I would restart that endeavour.

But first, I did some more local travelling - through the Mersey tunnel which was part of my and my family's life for many years - to a very changed Liverpool. I went for the Pier Head where the Royal Liver Building , one of Liverpool's '3 graces' remains.

I wandered round the area where there is now a 'Liverpool 1' shopping mall. Inevitably this is owned by a big property company. Via about 10 intermedate companies the ultimate owner is Land Securities Group, once an important customer of ours when I worked for Honeywell. As usual, I find these malls depressing. Perhaps it's my age, but the lack of anything much different seems to be a loss to me. Even John Lewis in Liverpool was always known as George Henry Lee though of course it is now John Lewis and Partners! Oh, there is a Liverpool FC superstore there, which tempted me in to spend my hard-earned on two handsome Liverpool FC overpriced mugs. If I'm brutally honest, I prefer the cheaper, much higher quality, mug I bought a couple of years ago at Oulton Park depicting my real hero, Jim Clark.

I moseyed around Liverpool a bit, starting in Renshaw Street where my father's business HQ once was. It was then a rather graceful mainly Victorian street where many of the main car showrooms were, together with the famous Lewis's store (not John Lewis) with its well- known statue of a naked man (hence the comment from a mythical Welsh woman that it was bigger then Owen Owen's). Lewis's is history - the shop empty and on the market, though he is still there in all his splendour.

Our old showroom is now completely derelict and boarded up, as is most of that once prestigious street and it seemed to me the new development had sucked the life out of the rest of the city centre. I then headed for St Helens, through outer centre areas like Wavertree which reminded me how relatively lucky we are in London. Shopping parades with nothing left but graffiti, flyposting and litter. Further out in the suburbs like Childwall and Huyton it was much better. The impact of inequality plain to see, and no surprise that so many people have lost faith in the future and started following false gods like Nigel Farage. They'd be a lot better off with Count Binface.

I was heading for the birthplace of Pilkingtons, which was an extremely innovative glass maker and the second largest in the world by the early 2000s. Of course, it lost its independence and is now a subsidiary of a Japanese company after a series of hostile bids on the London Stock Exchange. These things will be amongst what I investigate properly as I develop my proposed book.

To be fair, there is still large scale glass manufacture in St Helens like this big factory

Which had a horse employed I suppose as a security guard because I had just gone past the sign that said do not pass this sign. An unusual sight on an industrial site!

My next destination was Burton-on-Trent. That was the home both of Bass and Allied-Lyons (which chapter I already published in January). I checked Burton out and it said there was a brewing museum. It was more or less on my way home and a town I had never previously visited, and a river to boot, so sounded great.

Getting into the town there were those big brown signposts that show the way to attractions so I followed them, but couldn't find the museum. There were also signs for Tourist Information so I followed that. They would know. I found a car park where there was some kind of Arts Centre but no signs of an Information place. So I went in there. A big room with two women behind a desk. Nobody else in there and nothing going on. I asked them about the Tourist Informationand they said they were it. Well actually they weren't, but the nearest there was to Tourist Info in Burton. I asked about the museum. Oh, that was closed when the Americans took over. I remembered I had heard that but there was a plan to reopen it. But the ladies said there was no plan. They had no information either. Then one of them said 'Oh there may be something in the TV over there - a presentation or summat'. The TV was on the wall and not working. I turned the switch by the plug on and one of those 'booting up' screens appeared. Lady came over and between us we persuaded it to play with us.

Eventually a really good presentation of the history appeared. Nobody knew much about it so I used my phone to take pictures of it but in the end found a website https://www.breweryheritage.com/ which has related stuff on it. It's quite sad that the once HQ of brewing in the UK - I remember having a lecture where I worked from a man who had saved Allied Breweries from a previous crisis - and now... Well, there is still brewing there, but all owned by Americans and the council doesn't seem to care much about the town or its history!

So I will try to fill the hole a bit with a few random pics taken from the slides

IF this doesn't assuage your hunger for the history of breweres you willhave to wait ofr my book to be published. Son't hold your breath.