Fully illustrated with stunning photographs of dray horses coopers & grand Victorian architecture an elegy for the loss of so many of our classic homes of beer. The latest is Tetley's in Leeds: by the end of this year the classic Yorkshire beer will no longer be brewed in the county but rather in Wolverhampton & its historic brewery in the city will have closed. But Britain's classic breweries have been closing since the sixties usually taking their much-loved & flavoursome beers with them. Now Chris Arnot visits thirty towns & cities where the historic brewery has gone from Sunderland & Vaux in the north-east to Brighton & Tamplin's on the south coast & London where the closure of Truman's Whitbread Mann's Courage & many others has left the capital with just one major brewery & finds out from those who used to brew the beers & those who drank them how much was lost. This is a story of more than the disappearance of Tolly Cobbold bitter or King & Barnes' winter ale: all too often it is part of the heart of a town like Ipswich or Nottingham dying with the brewery
- something no microbrewery's resurrection of a hallowed ale can ever restore.