BRIDPORT in the 1790s was almost a one-company town. The company was the Gundry family’s rope and net works, which dominated the town’s economy and employed the lion’s share of its workers. The Gundrys clearly believed in the circulation of money, especially if it returned to where it started, because they established a brewery to ensure that some of the wages paid out on a Friday had circulated back to them, via the town’s pubs, by the end of the weekend. The brewery was sited just below
the confluence of the Asker and Brit rivers, which provided water power to drive machinery.
The Gundrys sold the brewery in the mid-1800s to a Mr Job Legg, who built up the business to sell ales all over southern England and installed the undershot waterwheel that can still be seen on the western side of the brewery buildings. The site now included a …
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