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My lovely niece has contracted the little known and even less understood Adenoid Cystic Carcinoma. If you would like to know more of her or of this cancer, or even to contribute to its cure, please click HERE: 

There were about 65 new pub images loaded in the spring with another 25 in October! Nearly all kindly contributed by John Berry. Some have not been identified – so please do have a look and see if you can help with this?

Our thanks to Karen & Gillian who lent me their grandfather George Bennet’s precious copy of a rare Hop Leaf Gazette dated May 1932.  It is now available to all of you on THIS PAGE  They also contributed some images of his Brewery ‘life’.  If there are any more Gazettes ‘out there’ do please let me borrow them briefly – so they can go up on this site and become more widely available.

On April 18th I was honoured to speak about ‘The Simonds Family of Reading’ with a focus on our geographically diverse origins and the ‘Adventurers and Entrepreneurs’ who helped to set up and lead H&G Simonds Ltd as well as other businesses.  If you face a long boring evening and would like to see the full presentation with speakers notes and including a few slides not shown on the evening through time constraints, then you can load it HERE:   read more…

What A Wonderful Family Reunion!  It seems that a great time was had by all our guests. We have a huge selection of images & videos for you to enjoy and share.  Click ‘HERE‘ for more.

We have just loaded a huge new collection of images, generously made available from the H&G Simonds archives by Heineken UK Ltd. There are 250 images of ‘Brewery People’ and many more images of pubs, hotels and even the Coopers in action! There are also some fabulous and unique images of Reading dated about 1899, now on the ‘timeline’. ENJOY!

We were invited to the exciting Loddon Brewery today by David & Vanessa Hearn, where the BBC conducted interviews and broadcast their dramatisation of the early years of the Simonds story. Listen to the broadcast and see more here:- read more…

The Hop Leaf News was published just 13 times quarterly from Winter 1954 – Winter 1961 and following requests from staff for greater coverage than was then provided by the Hop Leaf Gazette. These are now available on-line HERE:   Where they provide a great Social History resource from the period. I have posted all we have – just 5 missing! So please help to find them!

BBC Berkshire produced a series of programs to commemorate WW1  ‘World War One at Home,’ one of which features the recollections of David Simonds. You can listen to him ‘HERE’.