Arthur Guinness, Son & Co. Ltd Round Black Backed Steel

Arthur Guinness, Son & Co. Ltd black backed steel tray dating from 1935.

St James's Gate Dublin

Arthur Guinness started brewing ales in Leixlip, County Kildare, moving to the St James's Gate Brewery in Dublin, in 1759.
The firm's famous Harp Motif was adopted in 1862 and registered as a trade mark in 1875.
When the Company was registered as Arthur Guinness, Son & Co. Ltd in 1886, it was the largest brewery in the world.
As a result of the Anglo-Irish trade war, Guinness decided to move its headquarters to London in 1932.

The Creation of the Park Royal Brewery

In the early 1930s Guinness was exporting a million barrels a year from Dublin to Britain, making economic sense to set up a brewery in West London.
The slogan 'Guinness is Good for You' was well established by that time.
The art deco Guinness Park Royal Brewery, was designed by Alexander Gibb and Sir Giles Gilbert Scott.
It was built between 1933 and 1936, and was fully operational by 1937. The brewery buildings were all one hundred feet high and made of distinctive brown brick, each with inter-connecting bridges.
In the late 1930s the Company employed over 1,500 workers whose meals were all presented silver service.
The Company gained a reputation for being a caring employer, one to which workers would be willing to return to after World War II.

Famous Advertising

Before the 1930s Guinness produced almost no advertising, instead using word of mouth to sell its products.
In the face of falling sales, Guinness was responsible for some of the most memorable marketing campaigns ever produced, especially during the 1930s and 1940s.
The most notable and recognisable series of advertisements was created by the firm S.H.Benson Ltd, primarily drawn by the artist John Gilroy.
Benson's created posters that included slogans such as 'Guinness for Strength', 'Lovely Day for a Guinness', 'Guinness Makes you Strong', and 'My Goodness My Guinness', to name a few.
Most famous were Gilroy's cartoon characters, especially those with zoo animals accompanied by their zookeeper.
His most widely recognised adverts involved the Guinness toucan which first appeared in 1935.

Brewing at Park Royal

At first the Company's main focus was the production of bottled Extra Stout, and market share in Britain increased from 5.4% in 1933, to 7.9% in 1956.
Guinness did not own any public houses and most of its beers were either sold to other breweries for bottling, or directly to their tied houses.
At its peak in the early 1960s, the Park Royal Brewery was producing a staggering 1.6 million barrels of stout per annum, eight times more than any other large brewery at that time.
In the 1960s consumer drinking habits began to change, which resulted in Guinness commencing the brewing of its Harp Lager. The firm's sales of lager soared from 1% in 1960 to 50% in 1989, at the expense of ales and stouts. Harp became Britain's top selling lager.
Returnable bottle sales accounted for less than 20% of Guinness's sales by the end of the 1960s.

The Final Years

The Company name changed to Guinness plc in 1982.
Towards the end of its life, the large brewery was abandoned, and Guinness was brewed at a small modern brewery within the site.
In 1997 Guinness merged with Grand Metropolitan plc to create a new Company, Diageo.
Diageo ceased the production of Guinness at the Park Royal Brewery in 2005, transferring all brewing back to the Dublin site.
Considerable efforts were made to list the buildings and save the iconic brewery, however these attempts were turned down by the Secretary of State.
The entire site was demolished in 2006.