Viva the Hand

Hand in Hand. The Hand. Hand Brewpub. The neighbourhood corner boozer. The living room at the end of the street. The smallest pub in Brighton. The wonky ship. Our happy place.

It’s where our brewery got its name and where it all started for us.

In 2014, Jen and I were in the process of buying our first house. It was a big deal for us and very exciting, but alas, our first step on the ladder snapped and the house fell through. We were pretty down about that, so we went to our favourite pub to drown our sorrows - a pub that Jen had worked at, on-and-off, for a few years.

We knew a lot of people at the Hand - staff and punters - and we absolutely loved the place. The manager at the time was a lovely chap called Matty, who managed it for the owner, Brenda Robbins. Brenda was the widow of Bev Robbins, who installed the tower brewery in 1989. We have a certificate on the wall saying that Bev was the third member of SIBA (in its original form).

Matty had moved from Tenby nearly a decade earlier and ran the place in a calm, welcoming, humble way. It seemed effortless from where I was standing. He managed to keep the place buzzing for the different types of punter the Hand squeezed in. Always a great atmosphere, never any trouble. The music was always spot on and the drinks were always interesting. 

Jen would have quaffed red wine, maybe a cider. I would have drifted between Guinness, Kona Big Wave and the occasional Kriek Boon Cherry Lambic they had on draft. But I was also very interested in the beers Gary Sillence was brewing in the tower brewery hidden in the walls of the pub. He brewed a couple of house beers for the pub (under the name of Kemptown Brewery) and was building his own brand, Brighton Bier.

This was almost certainly my first exposure to real craft beer. I’d been drinking Guinness almost religiously for years after being a lager drinker in my younger years. Jen wasn’t a beer drinker at all back then. If the rider for her tour gigs (she was a bass player in an indie band) was a slab of lager, she would shove a load of lime into it and hold her nose.

All the time I spent in the Hand back then, I’d never gone upstairs and seen the brewery or the rest of the building. I had almost no knowledge of craft beer or the craft beer scene in Brighton.

Sidenote: around this time, Head Brewer Kate was starting her career in beer over in Paris at Frog Brew Pubs. We didn’t know Kate then, but it’s an interesting parallel in the Hand timeline - we were all venturing into this new world around the same time. Jen from hospitality and events, Kate from fashion and publishing, and myself from brand and marketing.

Anyway, as I was saying, our house had fallen through and we were talking to the manager, Matty, about it. He nonchalantly said something along the lines of “why don’t you buy this place?” and gestured to the pub.

We laughed - “what do you mean? They’re not selling the Hand?”. 

Matty leaned over the bar and whispered, “Brenda is secretly selling the Hand. She wants a couple to buy it that will really care about it and maintain it the way it is.” 

We flapped the suggestion away as absurd. Jen had worked in hospitality her whole life in one way or another and I had drunk in pubs for just as long, but neither of us had ever discussed or individually considered running or buying a pub.

I can’t remember if it was later that night or the next night, but very soon after Matty’s revelation, we were sat on the beach eating fish and chips and the Hand bubbled up in conversation. I remember us vaguely flirting with the idea: “we could never do it… Could we?” “Our parents would kill us!” “How would we even make it work?” “But how could we miss the opportunity to buy a Brighton institution?"

It was a pretty painful six months of wrangling, but eventually, we bought the 27 year lease and moved in. Our business plan had a long list of innovative, alternative, sometimes absurd ideas, but the main plan was to: build on what Brenda, Matty and Gary had built over the years, maintain the atmosphere and decor and create a brewery brand. 

I kept my corporate job and Jen ran the pub. It was a whole new world for us and we were really happy embarking on the new adventure.

I flirted with the idea of quitting my corporate job and becoming the Hand’s brewer. I bought a couple of recommended books, got a few chapters in and realised my brain simply didn’t work like that. It was all so unfamiliar to me. I quickly realised it would take me years to get anywhere close to making quality, sellable beer. It would have been painful, embarrassing and pointless. It was not a good plan.

So we incorporated The Hand Brewing Company Limited* (Hand Brew Co) and went looking for a brewer who knew what they were doing. It turned out that Gary knew just the person and introduced us to Jack. Jack had been cuckoo brewing out the back of the excellent Watchmakers Arms in Hove and was looking for a new project.

* We did want to continue the name of Kemptown Brewery, which was originally a large brewery that closed in the 1960s. Bev Robbins took that name for the tower brewery at the Hand, but after he died, an enterprising publican registered it for their business name as they had the livery on their pub. I tried out The Original Kemptown Brewing Company - OK Brew Co - which I thought was cool, but it didn’t go down well with Jen. I guess who wants to be just OK?

The tower brewery that Bev Robbins installed in 1989 was functional and could make great beers, but it needed some work if we were to make modern carbonated beers. So we removed the old Yorkshire squares and installed new tanks by cutting through the floor and lowering them into the cellar - like this.

This was such a lovely time. Jen and I lived in the apartment upstairs while she ran the pub and built her team. New customers mingled with old regulars. New fresh beers were invented and hit the taps next to old favourites. Brewers were running up and down the stairs every day. Kegs were rolling out the door to other venues across Brighton and the South East. The place felt alive. 

So that’s the story of how we ended up being called Hand Brew Co - because of the Hand in Hand pub. 

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But where did the name Hand in Hand come from?

One thing that makes the ‘Hand in Hand’ more intriguing than most other pub names is that there are so few. There are four currently operating in the country, and maybe only a couple more, now closed, in all of recorded history. It’s such a low number, there must be an interesting reason for it.

There’s no definitive source for where the name Hand in Hand originated, but there is one explanation that is far more satisfying than anything else. 

It’s absolutely fitting that the name may have originated as a symbolic expression of companionship, fraternity, and unity, as when I think of the Hand, this is what I think of. Or even an association with a famous trade guild ‘grip’ - many pubs historically served as meeting places for these sometimes secretive trade groups. So both of these versions are plausible.

However, there’s an alternative origin story that I was told by a friend who passionately researched the pub on finding out we were buying it all those years ago. I have absorbed this myth as truth. I pass it on as such.

Back in the day, many buildings including pubs were built of wood and lit by candles. A risky combination compounded by tipsy customers. It was very common for fires to break out in pubs and it wasn’t until the 1600s that a fire insurance company emerged from a London coffee house. 

That fire insurance company was called ‘Contributors for Insuring Houses, Chambers or Rooms from Loss by Fire, by Amicable Contribution’, which was rightly deemed not snappy enough and was later renamed ‘Hand in Hand’.

Businesses like pubs and inns would display a sign - a firemark - on the front exterior wall to show they were insured by a Hand in Hand policy. Placed there so that the firefighters knew which buildings to save, but also reassurance for punters. These lead or copper plaques usually had a crown, a shaking hands emblem and a policy number. Here is an example.

The connection to our pub is ambiguous - but like I said, it’s preferable and more exciting, so I’m going with it. 

There are rumours that the building was a coal merchant before it was a pub. Did that building have a Hand in Hand policy and therefore a plaque displayed on the building, so when it became a pub, it simply (accidentally) became known as Hand in Hand? Did this sort of thing happen to the other few Hand in Hand pubs?

We were also told (by someone I can’t remember) that after the coal merchant, it then became a public house called the Gasfitter’s Arms. This fits my preferred story - coal, gas, fire. But we can’t find any evidence of it ever being named this. There was a Gasfitter’s Arms on Tidy Street in the North Laine in Brighton, which was coincidentally also at number 33, which could be contributing to the confused history.

The story came to me like this: there was an insurance policy sign on the building called Hand in Hand and when they turned the old business into the pub, they thought that’s what it was called, and the reason the other ones in Britain are called that is because they were also mistaken. But that’s why there’s so few of them.

So I guess being accidentally called the Hand in Hand, and us accidentally buying the Hand in Hand fits together nicely. They go together hand in hand you might say.

Sidenote: the Hand in Hand fire insurance company from 1697 is now called Aviva.