• Held At: Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies
• Title: Messrs Simpsons Brewery of Baldock
• Description: This collection is made up of of two groups of documents; firstly, deeds and other papers of licensed houses and brewery premises in, and in a wide district round, Baldock, in the counties of Hertford, Bedford, Cambridge, Essex and Huntingdon, and secondly, a large and interesting series of brewery business records.
  
  The Firm itself , Purchased by Messers J and T G Simpson in 1853, had been built up in the later 18th and 19th Centuries by the Pryor family from the properties of the Thurgoods, Fitzjohns, Inds and other small breweries. In addition Simpsons added other properties in the years following their purchase of the brewery. After 110 years of existence Simpson's Brewery was taken over by Greene King (Biggleswade) Ltd in 1963.
  
  Owing in part to the collection beingmade up of two separate deposits, the second having been made 17 years after the first, the original inventory of the first deposit (which consisted of DE/Sb/T1 to DE/Sb/T143) has been supplemented by an inventory of the second deposit. However, a cross-referencing system has been incorporated into the original inventory which should enable the new, complete version to be used as one. Thus every licenced house mentioned in the collection has been included in the first half of the inventory which may therefore be used as an index under parishes. Rather than list as a large block in the text the 123 licensed houses once or more often under DE/Sb/T144 to DE/Sb/T151 (which are the documents themselves, or drafts thereof, used in Messrs Simpsons purchase of the firm in 1853), the descriptions of these bundles are summary, but in the first half of the inventory a reference note has been made beside each licensed house listed there which occurs or recurs in this sequence of documents. Other references point forward to the second alphabetical list of parishes, DE/Sb/T152 - DE/Sb/T184. It should be noted that where a cross-reference appears immediately after the name of a parish, rather than during or after the property description, as in 'Baldock see also DE/Sb/T148, DE/Sb/T153' this always denotes land only and not a new licensed house.
  
  A concordance of the bundle numbers used by Messrs Simpsons and their successors with the corresponding Hertfordshire references is included as an Appendix. Messrs Simpsons bundle numbers appear in round brackets after each entry in the first part of the inventory and after such items in the second part as possessed bundle numbers.
• Date: 16th - 20th century
• Accession Number: Acc 180
• Accession Number: Acc 1044
• Document Reference: DE/Sb
• Ref No: CDESb
• Level: Fonds
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