Sometimes a building is more interesting for the land it stands on rather than what we see now. Anchor Point, built at the corner of Bramall Lane and Cherry Street in 2007, isn’t particularly attractive. It contains 188 residential apartments, twelve family houses, office accommodation and a convenience store.
The u-shaped complex gets its name from a long-forgotten brewery that once stood on Cherry Street.
Anchor Brewery was founded in 1889 by Henry Tomlinson and manufactured fifty barrels of beer a day using water sourced by the Aqua and Diamond Rock Boring Company.
However, the brewery seems to have been ill-fated. Not least because Henry Tomlinson committed suicide two years later. He wandered to the home of an employee called Arthur Podgson on nearby Shoreham Street, where he killed himself with a knife.
The brewery continued and became a limited company in 1894.
Its fate was sealed during the Blitz of 1940 which destroyed most of the operation, and forced it to merge with another local brewer, Carter, Milner, and Bird to become the Hope & Anchor Brewery in 1942 with an extensive estate of public houses.
The old brewery was used as a packing station for export beer to troops in 1945.
Afterwards, the site was occupied by Arnold Laver, timber merchants although its outer walls still retained the Anchor Brewery sign.
When Arnold Laver wanted to relocate to new premises at Halfway, it developed the site as Anchor Point, although it retained its head office in the new development.
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