The Collection

Discover over 300 years of brewing industry history

The National Brewery Collection contains an unrivalled array of historical archives and artefacts that relate to brewing. This includes an extensive archive of ledgers, books, plans, photographs and film from the breweries around the UK; a library containing brewing-related books and journals and objects that include paintings, ceramics, glass, bottles, cans, beer mats and Inn-signs.

The Trust is working to develop a national hub of British brewing and pub heritage in Burton upon Trent, which will also be the permanent home for the Archives and key artefacts. This is a long term project and currently items are not available to the public. In the meantime you can search the Catalogue using the search button in the top right to find more about some of the items in the Archives.

We also have some handy tips for searching the Archive.

Charrington’s Photos available to buy

Among the items in the Archive is a large collection of photographs of pubs, part of the Charrington’s estate. The photos are a fascinating historical record of the buildings and society at the time. Although the originals are currently unavailable to the public, we have made available over 4600 of these images for commercial image sales via the historical image agency Mary Evans Picture Library.

You can view a selection of individually cropped images here: www.prints-online.com/national-brewery-centre-archives . This website allows anyone to purchase reproduction prints in a variety of formats with a proportion of royalties from all sales coming back to the Trust.