By the late 1990s, Sunderland had already learned how to bury its own industries. The coal was gone, and the shipyards on the Wear had fallen silent in 1988, their cranes coming down like felled trees. A city that had spent two centuries making things with its hands was learning uneasily to answer telephones in call centers. Yet through all of it, right through the middle of the city, the horses still worked.

Every morning they came out of the stables off Kilbridge Avenue, great heavy animals harnessed to carts stacked with wooden barrels, clopping out to deliver beer to the pubs of the town center. They held up the traffic, and nobody minded. They belonged to Vaux, the brewery on Castle Street whose brick bulk had dominated the skyline for 124 years. If the wind was right, you could smell the hops across the whole town, the warm, biscuity weight of malt, the green bitterness of hops drifting over the shops and the bus station.

It was the smell of the place being alive. Vaux had been brewing since 1837. It employed close to 600 people, owned pubs across the north of England, and had put its name on the shirts of Sunderland Football Club. It was one of the very last large firms in the city still owned and run from the city, and it was making money.

In the spring of 1999, with the beer selling, profits healthy, and the horses still working the streets, the men who owned this brewery would sit in a boardroom and decide to close it. Not because it was failing. It wasn’t. The story began in 1837 with a boy who had nothing.

Cuthbert Vaux was born in Bishop Wearmouth in 1813, the son of a master mariner. At 14, he went to work as an office boy at a brewery down on Low Street, and there, in the smell of the mash and the rattle of the cooperage, found the thing he would do for the rest of his life. By 1837, aged just 23, he set up on his own with a small brewery near Wearmouth Bridge, close to the river. Sunderland in the 1830s was a place on fire with industry, coal staiths crowding the river, shipyards multiplying along both banks, a port heaving with a large, hard-drinking laboring population.

A brewery by the river in a town like that was not a gamble. Cuthbert and Sarah Ann had 12 children; seven died in infancy. The little brewery sold everything it could make and within seven years had outgrown its own walls. In 1844, the brewery moved to larger premises on Union Street, but in 1875 the Northeastern Railway Company wanted the land to build Sunderland’s Central Station.

Vaux moved again, to a former slaughterhouse yard on Castle Street. It would be the brewery’s home for the next 124 years. Cuthbert Vaux died in 1878, an old man who had built a dynasty from an office boy’s wage. His grandsons came through, and in 1896 the family business became a limited company.

It was among the very first brewers in Britain to bottle its ales and stouts. Then, in 1898, a young chartered accountant named Frank Nicholson walked through the gates. In 1900 he married the boss’s daughter, and by 1919 he was managing director. In 1927 he engineered an amalgamation that made Vaux the second largest brewer in the northeast.

Only Newcastle Breweries was bigger. The most famous thing Vaux ever made was born on a battlefield. Ernest Vaux, Cuthbert’s grandson, was a lieutenant colonel who commanded a Maxim gun detachment in the Boer War. When he came home safely, the brewery marked the occasion the way a brewery marks anything.

In 1901 it launched a strong dark ale called Maxim, and in 1938 made it stronger still, renaming it Double Maxim. Sunderland people will tell you to this day that the Vaux brown ale had come first, more than 20 years before Newcastle Brown was ever poured. By the time of the Second World War, Vaux was buying up other brewers, and the office boy’s small concern had become a dynasty and a power in the north. The brewery filled an entire city block.

It had swallowed buildings as it went, turning the old Avenue Theatre into a bottling plant. Inside it was a world of mash tuns and coppers, steam and heat and the deep sweet smell of the wort. A copper mash tun was still turning out beer well into the 1990s because it worked and the men trusted it. In 1988 the company put in a whole new brewhouse, proof that this was no museum piece but a firm still investing in a future it fully expected to have.

Around 500 people worked there. The local MP Chris Mullin would describe a firm where relations between management and workers were good, where the bosses knew the men on the floor by their first names. The dray horses weren’t a marketing gimmick; they worked, right up until 1999. Jim Murray had been brewing Double Maxim since 1968, and the recipe lived in men like him.

The buildings hold the tanks, but the knowledge lives in the people, and when the people go, it goes with them. None of that ever appeared on a balance sheet. At its peak, Vaux and its Sheffield cousin Wards brewed close to half a million barrels a year and owned 888 pubs across the north of England. There was Samson, the bitter, Lambtons, Sunderland Draft, and a streak of genuine mischief, a honey ale called Waggle Dance in 1994, and seasonal beers with names like Moonlight Mouse, How’s Your Father, and Boxing Hare.

From 1985, the name Vaux was emblazoned across the front of Sunderland Football Club’s shirts. The architect George Clarke, a Sunderland lad, said his first legal pint was a pint of Vaux. Of the brand itself, he said simply, it ran through our veins. The man at the top of the company had, over these same years, quietly built something else.

Sir Paul Nicholson joined the family firm in 1965 and became chairman. Under him the company diversified, and above all into hotels. The hotel chain was called Swallow, and it took off. By the late 1990s the group ran around 36 hotels, and the hotels made money, clean, fast, modern money, the kind the City of London understood.

The beer, by comparison, looked like the past. In a single year, Swallow’s profits rose by almost 13 percent while the brewing division’s profits fell by nearly 12. The conclusion wrote itself. A phrase began to circulate among the analysts.

Vaux, they said, was no longer a brewer with a hotel business attached. It had become a hotel group carrying a brewer. In December 1998, the parent company changed its name to Swallow Group PLC. The brewery, the founding business, was demoted to a subsidiary.

The Nicholsons could see it happening but could no longer stop it. Over the decades the family’s holding had shrunk to around 2% of the firm their ancestors had built. The name on the building was theirs. The votes were not.

The ground had been shifting under every regional brewer in the country. In 1989 the government’s beer orders capped how many pubs any large brewer could tie to itself. The great brewers got out of pubs altogether and in many cases out of brewing, and new pub companies rose to swallow the abandoned estates. Within a little over a decade, four global firms would control around three quarters of the beer Britain drank.

The northeast had once had around 25 breweries; by the mid-1970s there were five. Vaux was one of the survivors, but surviving a cull is not the same as being safe. Over all of this ran a new orthodoxy that a company existed to return value to its shareholders, and everything else was sentiment. In June 1998, Sir Paul Nicholson stepped down as chief executive, staying on as chairman, and the board went looking for a modern chief executive.

It found Martin Grant, who came from Allied Domecq with a city cast of mind. Grant made clear from the outset that he would not be relocating to the northeast. The board also changed its financial advisers, moving the account to BT Alex, the investment banking arm of Deutsche Bank. Grant looked at the company and reached the conclusion the city had been circling for years: Vaux should get out of brewing entirely and put everything behind the hotels.

In September 1998, the board took its decision to leave brewing. It agreed reluctantly, and expressed a preference that the breweries be sold as a going concern, sold whole and alive to someone who would keep the fires lit. On the 14th of September, Vaux announced it would sell the brewing operations together with 350 tenanted pubs. Frank Nicholson, Sir Paul’s younger brother and managing director of the brewing division, decided he would buy the brewery himself.

He put together a management buyout with two senior executives, Mark Anderson and Doug Trotman, and they built an offer of 75 and a half million pounds for the two breweries and the 350 pubs. On the 29th of January 1999, the board granted them four weeks of exclusivity to firm up the bid. None of the big four national brewers had made an offer for the company, and the field seemed empty. But the fight was about to stop being about the brewery at all.

In January, Martin Grant submitted a paper to the board arguing that Vaux was worth 24 million pounds more closed down and asset stripped than sold as a going concern. As the weeks wore on, the gap kept moving. The advisers split down the middle. The management team was told its bid was 5 million short, though Sir Paul believed the true gap was smaller still, perhaps two or three million.

The number shrank every single time somebody looked at it. Grant and the finance director, Neil Gossage, then went behind the backs of their own board to the company’s biggest shareholders, the institutions who held around 30 percent of the shares, and told them the management buyout would raise some 20 million pounds less than closure would. On the 9th of February 1999, they were sacked for it. But two weeks later, the non-executive directors voted to veto the management buyout, and Frank Nicholson’s offer was dead on the table.

In March 1999, the board met and by a majority accepted the advice of BT Alex Brown, rejected the management buyout for good, and resolved to close the breweries, not sell them. They believed they were doing their duty to their shareholders. On the 26th of March, Sir Paul Nicholson resigned as chairman. In a memoir called Brewer at Bay, he set down what he believed had happened, calling the decision corporate vandalism.

At the shareholders meeting that June, he stood up from the floor to register his contempt. On a show of hands in that hall, he won. But the institutional proxy votes were counted, and he lost. The redundancies were announced at the end of April 1999, and the closure was fixed for the 2nd of July.

More than 700 people were going to lose their work, around 600 of them in Sunderland, more than 100 in Sheffield at Wards. Chris Mullin secured an adjournment debate in the House of Commons and called it the unacceptable face of capitalism and willful vandalism. The Trade Secretary, Stephen Byers, offered 6 million pounds of public money to any buyer who would keep the brewery open. Other MPs spoke for it.

Sunderland’s council fought for the site. All of it failed. There was no buyer the board would accept. The 2nd of July came.

The beer stopped, and the great vessels fell quiet. And at the gate, Frank Nicholson did the only thing left to a man who had tried and failed to save the place he loved. He stood there and shook the hand of every single worker as they came out through the gate for the last time, thanking each of them for what they had done. Within days the signs came down, and in September they auctioned the place off, the drays, the lorries, the copper vessels, all of it laid out in lots.

Thousands of people came. By the end of it there was nothing left a city could point to and call its own. Up in Sheffield, Wards closed too, and CAMRA marched a mock funeral through the streets. The smell of hops did not drift across Sunderland the next morning, or any morning since.

The future the board had chosen did not survive either. In January 2000, barely six months after the last beer was brewed, the whole of Swallow Group was bought by Whitbread for 578 million pounds. The hotels were sold within months. The Swallow name passed on again, and the company that carried it collapsed into administration in September 2006 with debts of around 40 million pounds.

The last hotel anywhere to carry the Swallow name closed in 2014. The brewery had been sacrificed for the hotels, and within seven years the hotels were gone as well. The site itself, the 26 acres at the dead center of Sunderland, was demolished by around 2002, and the land sold to Tesco for a reported 13 million pounds. For the better part of 20 years, the middle of the city was an empty lot where a brewery used to be.

But the beer did not die. Doug Trotman and Mark Anderson, together with Jim Murray, the head brewer who had made Double Maxim since 1968, bought up the rights to the beers and formed the Double Maxim Beer Company. At first the beer had to be brewed under contract far away at Robinsons in Stockport, but by 2007 and 2008 they were brewing on Wearside once more at Houghton-le-Spring. The recipe that had lived in Jim Murray’s head, the thing no valuer could have found a figure for, survived.

It walked out of the gates in the mind of a brewer, and it kept going. The firm brews to this day as the Maxim Brewery. The horses were sold off with everything else at the September auction, and where they went, no reliable record tells us. They simply walked out of the story and were gone.

Now the ground where Vaux brewed its beer is the centerpiece of the largest regeneration the city has ever attempted. There is an office building called The Beam, a new city hall opened in 2021, and plans for a thousand low-carbon homes. The first new neighborhood has been given a name chosen deliberately, Vaux. In 2019, a new Vaux brewery was founded by a handful of Sunderland friends who refused to let the name lie dead in the ground, later joined and backed by George Clarke, the boy whose first legal pint had been a pint of Vaux.

In Keel Square, directly across from the ground where the living brewery once stood, there is now a sculpture by Ray Lonsdale, unveiled in 2021, showing two draymen and their horses at work mid-stride, cast in steel. It is called Gan Canny, an old Wearside way of saying go carefully. Sir Paul Nicholson lived a long life after the fight he lost, serving as Lord Lieutenant of County Durham for 16 years, and died on the 17th of January 2025 at the age of 86. The name remains on new homes, on a new beer, in the mouths of people far too young to have ever tasted the old one.

And in the very middle of the city, two great animals stand cast in steel, mid-stride, going nowhere at all, on the precise spot where every morning for the better part of a hundred years, the living horses came out at dawn and made the whole town wait, and nobody minded.