The Mortlake Brewery, used continuously since 1487, and its contents are to be sold at auction.

The 21-acre Mortlake site, famous as the home of Watney’s Red Barrel and Pale Ale beers until the 1980s, was one of eight huge London breweries still operating in the mid-‘70s.

Items to be auctioned include the compressor house, the bottling line and equipment from the boiler room.

For the past 20 years the brewery produced vast quantities of Budweiser, with more than 60,000 bottles of lager an hour processed by its bottling line for distribution in the UK and across Europe.

Developer Reselton bought the brewery site in 2015 for £158million.

It is expected it will be turned into a "high-density residential-led" scheme complete with restaurants, cafes and retail space alongside a museum and boathouses.

Jason Pinder, national head of machinery and business assets at Eddisons, said: “The vast scale of the contents of this iconic brewery is likely to attract the interest of global brewing businesses as well as those in developing countries.

“This is a rare opportunity to invest in high quality, large capacity brewery plant. We expect high levels of interest in the plant.”

Mortlake Brewery timeline

Commercial brewing began during the 18th century, when court rolls suggest there were two small breweries - under separate ownership - on the site.

In 1807 James Weatherstone, an innkeeper and maltster, extended the premises northwards towards the river, and the two small breweries became one in 1811.

It changed hands numerous times during the 19th century, before large-scale expansion took place in 1903, when an eight-storey malting was built.

During the 1960s the brewery maintained its status as the leading employer in Mortlake and the surrounding areas, with about 1,400 employees on the books.

Expansion continued during the 1970s but technological advances meant the number of staff fell to about 400 by the mid-1980s.

And in 1995 American giant Anheuser Busch took up a lease on the site, where it produced Budweiser until it closed for good in 2015.