The Wrekin Brewery

However, it was not all bad news. Wellington's most successful brewing concern was established in 1870, when Thomas Taylor founded the Wrekin Brewery Company in Market Street. After many takeovers, the business became a limited liability company in 1922 and was eventually acquired by O.D Murphy, who later gained a controlling interest in the firm. Murphy already owned the former Shropshire Brewery buildings in Holyhead Road, which he had purchased in 1912 and reopened as the Wrekin Mineral Water Works. As part of the conditions of sale, it was agreed that no further brewing would take place on the site, which then became a bottling plant for a wide variety of soft drinks and beers made by national brewers, earning the premises the nickname of the 'Pop Works'. The Shropshire Brewery name was later transferred to the Wrekin Works in Market Street and under his family's stewardship, the Wrekin Brewery Company went on to become an important regional beer producer that owned over 200 public houses across the Midlands and Wales by the 1960s.

The business continued to play a vital role in Wellington's local economy for many years after the Victorian period and the distinctive smell of fermenting beer could be smelt hanging over the town on Mondays and Thursdays when brewing of the 'Famous Wrekin Ales' was carried out. However, the situation was to change dramatically in February 1969 when the Company closed, having been sold to the Greenall Whitley group only a few years earlier. The brewery and its many buildings were demolished during the 1970s and Wilkinson's hardware store now occupies the site. The Wrekin Mineral Water Works on Holyhead Road, at one time a major supplier for the whole of Shropshire, closed during the 1960s and was later swept away by the Telford Development Corporation, leaving us with no trace of one of Wellington's best known and successful businesses.

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