No. 6 Brewer Street and associated structures Oxford

Oxford Archaeology has undertaken a programme of building recording on several
buildings and structures prior to a development by Pembroke College on the south
side of Brewer Street. The site is close to the centre of Oxford and the structures form
several fragments from the post-medieval history of the site. They include two walls
from a possible 17th-century malthouse on Rose Place, a much altered building on
Brewer Street (No.6) which was probably originally of 18th-century date, a nib of
historic wall at Campion Hall (the former Micklem Hall), and a 20th-century
workshop which appears to have formed something of an industrial estate, housing a
number of separate industrial concerns. This principal manufacture within this
workshop was a printworks.
The surviving walls from the malthouse are an interesting reminder of this area having
historically been a focus of the brewing industry and this building was included by the
RCHM in 1939 in their Inventory of the Monuments of the City of Oxford.
Documentary evidence suggests that No 6 Brewer Street also formed part of a brewery
and it is a good example of a building which has evolved with a number of major
alterations which retained elements of the primary stone building in the external shell.
Two walls survive from the original stone building and these contain a patchwork of
secondary alterations which suggest that the primary building may have had two low
upper floors, a common feature of malthouses.
The workshop/printworks are not of particular intrinsic significance but they are an
example of the type of modest industrial concern which was once common relatively
close to the centre of Oxford.
None of the buildings was listed but the current project has provided a valuable record
of them prior to their loss in the development.
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