Guinness isn't good for you: Britain's best twentieth-century buildings may be listed, but cynical, greedy corporations are still finding ways to demolish them—and more than architecture is at stake

Apollo, August, 2005 by Gavin Stamp

Brave New Worlds have a way of Iooking rather shabby and sad before too long. Between the two world wars, an exciting future seemed to be represented by London's growth to the west and north-west. New, wide arterial roads, first mooted in 1909, were laid out to cope with the massive expansion of motor traffic. Along the Great West Road new factories reflected the growth of light industry that made the South-East prosperous when the old heavy industries of the North were in deep recession. The best were the 'fancy factories', the Art Deco-cum-Egyptian buildings designed by Wallis Gilbert & Partners, of which the most celebrated was the Firestone Factory. 'The Great West Road looked very odd,' thought J.B. Priestley in 1933. 'Being new, it did not look English. We might have suddenly rolled into California.' What could be more modern than America, and Hollywood?

More interesting was Western Avenue, laid out from Acton in 1922-27 in the direction of Oxford. With new semi-detached houses lining the dual-carriageway and a smart new Underground station and modernistic shopping parades at Park Royal, it developed into a linear exemplar of inter-war British architecture--especially as there was the Hoover Factory, another Wallis Gilbert fancy factory, further out at Perivale. But the most impressive structures along what became the A40 were the three big monumental brick blocks rising on the north side on an eminence at Park Royal. This was another industrial complex, but one producing a product much more necessary than vacuum cleaners, tire extinguishers, razor blades or car tyres. It was the new brewery--the first in England--run by Arthur Guinness & Co. of Dublin. 'My Goodness! My Guinness!' went one of the many striking and witty contemporary posters issued by the firm, but an equally good advertisement was this generous and magnificent industrial landmark.

The Guinness Brewery at Park Royal opened in 1936. The consulting engineers who designed it were Sir Alexander Gibb & Partners, but the external appearance was entirely due to the consulting architect, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott--fresh from his triumph in industrial architecture at Battersea Power Station. As at Battersea, Scott humanised the vast masses without denying their sublime industrial character by facing the steel structures with conspicuously fine brickwork and minimal 'jazz modern' trim. Equally important, he made the three different principal blocks--Malt Store, Brewhouse and Storehouse--rise to the same 100-foot height, despite the falling ground, which gives the total ensemble a powerful visual presence. As at Battersea and at Bankside Power Station--now Tate Modern--Scott made utilitarian structures into great architecture. And now it is all to be demolished, to be replaced by a business park.

The Scott buildings have already been partly obscured as a landmark by a tawdry modern office block erected in front by Diageo, the multinational conglomerate that now owns poor old Guinness (no family members have been on the board since the Ernest Saunders-Distillers scandal of the 1980s). Brewing on the site will cease later this year, and all the 1930s structures demolished. How can this be, when, surely, they must be listed, as is Battersea Power Station and most other creations by the great designer of Liverpool Cathedral, the House of Commons and the red telephone box? The trouble is that, after much lobbying and despite expert advice from English Heritage and others, Diageo secured a Certificate of Immunity from listing, having argued that statutory protection would inhibit their operations and so endanger local employment. 'We act sensitively, with the highest standards of integrity and social responsibility,' announces the Diageo website. Yet, rather than stay, Diageo is closing the brewery and is indulging in mere speculative development, thus rendering the Certificate of Immunity (which expires in 2008) ethically unjustifiable if legally valid. No serious attempt has been made to see if the brewery buildings can be re-used.

The imminent, scandalous fate of the Guinness Brewery is symbolic of the general decline of Western Avenue. What was, in the 1930s, one of the largest and most important industrial areas in Britain was seriously depressed by the 1980s, threatening many of the buildings despite the growing appreciation of inter-war architecture. At least the Hoover Factory has secured a new life as a Tesco supermarket, unlike the poor old Firestone Factory, which was demolished by its owners, Trafalgar House, over a bank-holiday weekend in 1980 in anticipation of listing. Elsewhere, much has changed and is changing. At Western Circus, close to the London County Council's humane and impressive Old Oak Common estate, the large cinema and attendant shops that once defined the road junction have been swept away, leaving an incoherent space. A little further out, a small factory of subart-nouveau character that always intrigued me, as it bore the unlikely date of '1916', has been replaced by a much larger and far less interesting commercial block. No longer is Western Avenue an instructive study in interwar development; it is now a sad, uninteresting, polluted motorway, choked with traffic.