The building at 503 Hackney Road has been standing since 1856. Not as a concept or a brand, but as brick and mortar on one of East London’s oldest thoroughfares - a road with possibly pre-Roman origins as a cattle route to Smithfield Market. The story of this building is the story of the neighbourhood it has watched change around it.
Chandler’s Brewery
In 1856, John Chandler & Co. was first recorded at this address in the Post Office Directory as brewers and maltsters. The brewery supplied 35 tied pubs across East London - the local drinking houses of Bethnal Green, Hackney, and the surrounding streets.
This was not a small operation. The brewery was rebuilt twice - once in 1871 and again in 1893 - and was significant enough to earn a feature in the Brewers’ Journal, the national trade press, on 15 October 1893. In 1895, a 120-foot chimney was added to the site, a genuine physical landmark visible across the surrounding streets of Hackney Road.
Chandler’s was the local independent in a neighbourhood of brewing giants. A few streets away on Brick Lane stood Truman, Hanbury, Buxton & Co., producing 600,000 barrels a year by 1876. Charrington & Co. operated from Mile End Road. Mann, Crossman & Paulin brewed at Whitechapel Road. This was East London’s forgotten brewing district - a neighbourhood built on physical labour, drink, and community.
A Gentleman Brewer
The man behind the brewery was as contradictory as the building itself. John Edmund Chandler was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He owned a steam yacht, wintered in the Mediterranean, and served as Commodore of the Sussex Yacht Club. A gentleman brewer whose business served the working-class pubs of Bethnal Green.
He died in 1898, aged just 38. The brewery outlived him by thirteen years.
That contradiction - industrial and refined, working and elegant - is not a brand concept invented in a meeting room. It is literally what this building has always been. It is the reason we call our visual identity Industrial Romance.
After the Brewery
In 1911, Charrington & Co. acquired the brewery. Brewing ceased. The building became a workshop, and it stayed one - quietly, without fanfare - while East London changed around it. Through the post-war years, through Hackney’s difficult decades of the 1970s and 1980s, through the gentrification that eventually made the area desirable again.
Three Generations on One Plot
Three generations of the Mills family held the freehold of this building. The land did not change hands. It stayed. While properties around it were sold, developed, demolished, and rebuilt, 503 Hackney Road remained in the same family’s ownership.
In 2015, Kevin Mills - with Jon and James Penn - restored the building. Not redesigned it. Not reimagined it. Restored it. The exposed brick, the steel beams, the ironwork, the proportions of the space - these are not design choices. They are what was always there.
The Building Today
Today The Hackney is an exclusive hire venue for weddings, corporate events, and private celebrations, with a cafe-bar open seven days a week. Sixty seated, one hundred standing, and yours for the day.
The building that John Chandler built, that the Mills family held, and that we restored is the same building you walk into today. The timber beams overhead, the brick underfoot, the light through the skylight - 170 years of Hackney Road, still standing.
If you would like to see the building for yourself, come and visit us for a tour - or read more about what The Hackney is today. To check availability for hiring the venue, see the calendar.
The historical details in this article are verified against the Post Office Directory, Brewery History Society records, Victoria County History of Middlesex, and HM Land Registry. Full source documentation is held internally.