Ponteland Brewery and Brewery Lane

Today, the presence of a brewery which operated behind the Seven Stars pub and the river, is only commemorated in the name Brewery Lane which runs alongside the buildings at the side of Waitrose’s but on the other side of the Seven Sisters you can still see the remains of the exterior wall of the brewery which now forms the boundary wall running along the driveway to the rear carpark.

There was probably a small scale brewery here from as early as the mid-eighteenth century brewing the beer served in the Seven Sisters which dated from around this time. It is first listed as a separate concern however in the 1830’s when it carried on business as Coulter and Shanks with Robert Coulter appearing in the 1841 census as brewer. Coulter and Shanks sold up in that year and moved on to run the Newmarket Hotel in Newcastle. The business was then taken on by John Dixon Laws when it was known as the Ponteland Brewery. He left in 1861 when he moved to the New Brewery in Morpeth which he ran very successfully.

The brewery was then taken over by John Wilkinson. There is an intriguing correspondence from his grandson published in the Evening Chronicle in 1938 prompted by the discovery of an old exercise book on which was written “Wilkinson’s Brewery, Ponteland, June 6th, 1663,” followed by the name John Fatkin. The journalist suspected that the date on the exercise book was a mistake and Mr. E. R. Wilkinson writing from the Pine Street Brewery of Messrs. Wilikinson and Co, Newcastle wrote to confirm that it was an error and should have been 1863. He wrote that his grandfather John Wilkinson had been running the brewery in Ponteland then and that his father, who was born in that year, remembered an employee named Fatkin who worked for the company.

Transport links were improving and the small scale breweries on pub premises gave way to centralised brewers whose economies of scale meant that they could supply beer much cheaper. At the Seven Stars, John Wilkinson had facilities for brewing 27 half barrels per session. This was small by the standards of the time, and when the property went to auction in 1877 it attracted no bids above the minimum price of £2,000. Brewing then carried on until 1881 when Wilkinson retired. The correspondent writing in 1938 remembered visiting the site as a child and exploring the ruins of the derelict brewery. These appear in a painting of the site made in 1902. There was a large chimney which was a local landmark until that was finally demolished in 1906.