In November 2022 Heineken announced that it would close or sell off the Espérance Brewery in Schiltigheim, a suburb of Strasbourg in France. The reaction from the Green mayor, Danielle Dambach, was shock, describing the closure as “unacceptable” and promising to maintain economic activity, “not a microbrewery”. However, it was not just the loss of 240 jobs that provoked that reaction. This closure cut much deeper.
The town of Schiltigheim runs along the north of Strasbourg. You can still hear Alsatian (a local Germanic language) on the streets and in cafés, but French now predominates, particularly among the immigrant groups (there are big Portuguese and Turkish communities) and the Français de l’intérieur (French people who are not from Alsace). The boundaries of the town are at one point only a few hundred metres from the European Parliament (EP) and other institutions, so increasingly EP staff are also choosing to make Schiltigheim their home.
A city built on brewing
Brewing has a rich tradition in Alsace. In many ways the situation is ideal: hops grow well there: Alsace is on the same latitude as Bavaria and Czechia. There is plentiful running water for beer and for power: medieval Strasbourg became rich owing to tanning, made possible by all that running water. The land is suitable for crops like barley. And in former times the big rivers and canals allowed for barrels to be transported across France and to other parts of Europe. Schiltigheim styles itself as the “Brewery City” (cité des brasseurs). Its growth in industrial times and in the twentieth century was as a result of its many big breweries. Recently, however, that number has dwindled. Heineken has been a major actor in this.
A rich tradition under threat
Over the years, Heineken has bought three of the big breweries, but then closed two of them (Fischer and Adelshoffen) in the early 2000s, moving production to its third, the Espérance. Another huge brewery, Schützenberger, was closed in 2006 after more than 260 years of production. Perle left Schiltigheim, albeit it has moved only a few hundred metres away to Strasbourg itself, where production continues. A small brewery, Storig, is still going strong, but as regards large operations, Heineken’s is the last one standing.
It is easy to portray Heineken as the villain of the piece. Buying up independent brewers only to close them down, destroying competition, does smack of the kind of dubious capitalism that people resent. Heineken argues that accessibility to the site is difficult as it stands. Kronenbourg, another large brewer, whose beers are sold extensively in the UK, left Strasbourg for a greenfield site not far from the picturesque town of Obernai for this reason.
Seeing local brands leave ‘sticks in the craw’
It will unquestionably stick in the craw of Alsatians, however, to see iconic local brands such as Adelscott, Ancre and Fischer (and indeed George Killian’s Irish Red) being brewed in Marseille and on the Belgian border, where Heineken intends to move production. This is a heavy blow to local identity.
Author’s photos, used with permission.
Regarding Dambach’s pledge to retain the site as a productive brewery, history tells us that will be in vain. It is a story familiar to many towns in the UK and around Europe as a traditional industry takes a downward slide, which is very hard to arrest even with really strong action on the part of the authorities.
But even apart from the heart being torn out of the town, what replaces it is equally important. Schiltigheim looks very different from the rest of Alsace, which is mainly chocolate-box towns and villages on the famous Wine Route so beloved of tourists. It has an industrial built heritage.
Replacement architecture ignores tradition
Several of the breweries – these are very large sites – along with many of the other factories in the town, including textile factories, are being gradually redeveloped into apartment blocks. Despite the closures people will still want to live there because of the thriving jobs market in Strasbourg and over the Rhine in Germany. Yet so far what is being built is sadly subpar. The developments don’t integrate into the local area and fail to retain anything of the façades or feel of the brewing and manufacturing past. The expectation is that the 12-hectare Espérance Brewery will inevitably go the same way.
Local identity is strong in France, and the French are generally good at preserving and integrating new developments into that. This contrasts with much of Ireland, where planners have failed, for example in permitting fake stone-clad walls on municipal buildings in Connemara, next to actual drystone walls and stone cottages.
Author’s photos, used with permission.
With the loss of brewing, local identity is lost
I had occasion recently, when visiting England, to go to Salford and Stockport. Like Schiltigheim, these are two former industrial towns next to a thriving city, in this case Manchester. While neither is perfect – there are some eyesore developments – there are real efforts to preserve the look, the skyline, the sense of place. It can be done.
We complain a lot about globalisation as how places lose their identity. Yet there is power in the local. We can control how our environment feels. For Schiltigheim the test is now here. Will it still feel like a unique place? Or will it become a soulless suburb of identikit blocks, that could be anywhere else, from Madrid to Warsaw?
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