Just mentioning the existence of a whisky distillery in London is enough to solicit the most vacant of expressions from the capital’s city slickers. It’s a fact of life that Darren Rook, co-founder of The London Distillery Company, is well accustomed to. Most young entrepreneurs would be wrenching their hair out in despair; he’s calm and collected. In fact, the venture’s relative obscurity appears to be the ace up his sleeve.

“People are always blown away when they hear what we do and see our site. It’s a huge departure from Speyside or the islands. We regularly see a little double take when we say there’s a distillery in London.”

With the absence of tell-tale pagoda chimneys poking though the urban jungle canopy, it’s perhaps understandable how a distillery innocuously camouflaged in a former dairy in Battersea might have gone unnoticed by most Londoners.

Traditionally, London has been associated with gin. At its peak, there were around 1,500 residential gin distilleries producing a cheap spirit that was then the tipple of choice for the masses. Whisky on the other hand was much more niche with only six documented distilleries making malt spirit; the last one, Lea Valley, closed its doors at the turn of the last century.

A former tree surgeon and ambassador for the Scotch Malt Whisky Society, Rook met future associate Nick Taylor at an event where talk invariably turned to the rise of craft distilleries around the world and London’s apparent lack of them. Pretty soon, the two were proposing to open the first distillery in London for over a century. At the time the plan was hatched in January 2010, the acrimonious legal wrangling that sank a similar project of the same name two centuries before remained long forgotten.

“Believe it or not, we didn’t actually discover Ralph Dodd and the intended distillery story until after starting our version of The London Distillery Company. That was an incredible moment to suddenly inherit history from 1807. Really, it’s a marketing professional’s wet dream.”

Before being relegated to the shadows of his contemporaries and successors, Ralph Dodd was known as something of a forward thinker and pioneer. As well as promoting plans for Vauxhall Bridge, four water works and the Grand Surrey Canal, he was the first to develop the idea and fundraise for a tunnel under the Thames and a pier in Brighton. His accomplishments and schemes arguably laid the foundations for the likes of Victorian visionaries Isambard Kingdom Brunel and George Stephenson amongst others.

One of his least well-known schemes was a whisky distillery in Nine Elms, not too far from the current London Distillery Company site on Parkgate Road. Unfortunately, the waters were muddied by a competing Essex distiller and Dodd’s company was driven into the ground by the courts.

“That was an incredible moment to suddenly inherit history from 1807. Really, it’s a marketing professional’s wet dream”

It was purely by chance, after Rook and Taylor’s new company had been registered and start-up capital crowd-sourced, that someone sent them an image of a mid-19^th century bottle labelled ‘London Distillery’. Although this bottle was nothing to do with Dodd, it wasn’t long before they discovered they were unwittingly repeating history.

Where Dodd had been thwarted however, Rook and his partner succeeded and have in effect picked up from where the engineer left off thanks to serendipity. Having further excavated his story, the team thought it only fitting to name their gin brand – currently their main product – in his honour as a fitting tribute to a kindred spirit.

So, what would Dodd have made of Rook and Taylor’s modern distillery? “We’d like to think he’d have approved. Dodd was a serial entrepreneur and a very creative, innovative person – as an engineer and a Royal Academy-trained artist. He wasn’t scared of trying or failing and he’d have respected the fact that we’ve made it happen.”

The two distilleries could not be any further apart, not least in terms of scale and scope. Whereas Dodd planned a large complex, Rook and the team prefer to stick to organic small batch distillation to really get to grips with the intricacies of creating unique whisky.

“Our goal has never been to compete but to complement and educate. We can do things most distilleries can’t due to our scale and our passion to learn. Our fermentation is one cask so we can experiment, tweak and bespoke each individual cask to our requirements.”

Although the means are different, the vision remains the same as it did in 1807: to be a UK leader in producing natural spirits. But what of their own legacy?

“My wife noted recently that there aren’t many people who have built something that is part of the UK’s or London’s history. No one can take that away from you.” Ralph Dodd couldn’t have asked for a better epitaph himself.

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David Walsh is a freelance writer living in Edinburgh. As a lapsed Mancunian and adopted Scot, he’s a lover of real ale and fine drams in equal measure. To ease his itchy feet, he frequently gallivants. Follow him on twitter  @David_M_Walsh or read more of his words here.

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