History
The brewery was formed in 1828 when retired cotton manufacturer John Lees, who had been a major manufacturer of fustians, nankeens and jaconets with mills in Oldham and Manchester, purchased some land in Middleton, Lancashire and built Greengate Brewery, from which the company still operates. The company was renamed J.W. Lees & Co. Brewers, when John Lees' grandson, John William Lees, took over the company in 1876.
The company is still family owned and operated to the present day. When William, Simon, Christina and Michael Lees-Jones joined Richard and Christopher at JW Lees in the 1990s they were the sixth generation from the founder.
In June 2004, Greengate Brewery was included in the television show Most Haunted, and in 2003 HRH Prince Charles, The Prince of Wales, visited to celebrate the brewery's 175th anniversary.
Read more about this topic: JW Lees Brewery
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“As I am, so shall I associate, and so shall I act; Caesar’s history will paint out Caesar.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)