Red Lion Brewery

The Red Lion Brewery was both an industrial workplace and a conspicuous landmark in Lambeth: its chimneys spread the smell of yeast and hops across the neighborhood, while its fires provided the work George Merrett had performed for eight years. Its high walls and ornate gates stood on the route he took to an early shift on the night he was shot nearby, bringing the brewery’s ordinary labor into the setting of a sudden killing.

Site and Industrial Setting

The brewery stood on Belvedere Road, just north of Hungerford Bridge. Its chimneys sent out a sickly mixture of yeast and hops that lay over Lambeth, a district already known for the noise and pollution of its workshops, factories, and elevated railways. The location placed the brewery within a crowded industrial landscape of warehouses, small firms, and working-class housing, rather than among the squares and terraces developed on the other side of the Thames.

The site’s prominent red lion, the brewer’s symbol, made the brewery recognizable beyond its immediate workforce. For George Merrett, employment at such a well-known institution offered a point of pride despite the limited money in the job. The account sets that emblem against the material conditions of the surrounding district: soot, railway noise, and the hard routine of manual work.

Work and Daily Operation

Merrett had been employed at the brewery for eight years as a stoker, one of the gang responsible for keeping its fires burning through the day and night. Their labor kept the vats bubbling and the barley malting. The work was continuous and physical: on the morning of his death, Merrett was preparing to heave coal for an eight-hour shift.

His journey followed a familiar pattern. He left his home at 24 Cornwall Cottages before dawn, dressed for the cold in a threadbare greatcoat, a smock-jacket, corduroy trousers, heavy socks, and black boots. His wife had seen him set out beneath a gas lamp, as she had on the twenty previous nights he had worked the dawn shift. He was heading toward the brewery’s high walls and gates, expecting the ordinary labor of the fires.

The Brewery in the Account of Merrett’s Death

Merrett never reached the brewery. As he passed the entrance to Tenison Street, between the Lambeth Lead Works and the brewery’s north wall, a man pursued and shot him. The first shot struck the brewery wall; a later shot hit Merrett in the neck. The account thus places the brewery in the geography of the attack without making the workplace itself its cause: it was the destination of Merrett’s routine walk and one of the fixed boundaries beside the street where he was killed.

After the shooting, Constables Burton and Ward carried the wounded Merrett to a hansom cab and sent it south along Belvedere Road to St Thomas’s Hospital, about 500 yards away. The route from the brewery district to the hospital links the industrial setting to the unsuccessful attempt to save him. In the narrative, the brewery remains at once a place of employment, a public landmark, and the destination Merrett was approaching when his normal working journey ended in violence.