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128 more money through asset stripping. In July of that year the city centre brewery was closed.3The controversy didn%u2019t end there though. The site stood empty for a number of years before it was bought by Tesco in 2001. The company drew up plans to put a large supermarket and other retail on the site, but this wasn%u2019t popular with the fear that a large supermarket would have a negative impact on the rest of the city centre. Years of legal wrangling ensued.4Meanwhile the site remained empty, and became a symbol of the wider decline of Sunderland%u2019s city centre.Finally the deadlock with Tesco was broken when it sold the land in 2011 and it was passed to the council. Tesco instead opted to build the supermarket on top of what was the bowling alley over the river.But the troubles didn%u2019t stop there. The Council entered into a partnership with global construction and services company Carillion, and 17 years on from the brewery%u2019s closure, the office block now known as the Beam finally started to rise out of the ground. Until, that is, in a huge scandal Carillion were found to have been cooking the books. They went bust, and building stopped. A new contractor was found and the building was completed in 2019. The same fate later befell the contractor Tolent, which 3 %u2018Chairman lifts lid on deal which closed Vaux%u2019, BBC 9th June 20034 %u2018Timeline: The history of Sunderland%u2019s Vaux brewery as it prepares for city rebirth%u2019, Sunderland Echo 12th February 2019also went bust while building housing on the site.Thankfully though, at the time of writing (25 years after the brewery%u2019s closure), change is now very much occurring and at a fast pace to boot. The City Hall opened on the site in 2021, further office blocks Maker and Faber are soon to be finished, the new eye hospital is rising out of the ground and the footbridge linking the site to the Sheepfolds is nearing completion. But what of Vaux? It%u2019s story didn%u2019t end in 1999. Some of the management bought the rights to beers such as Double Maxim, Samson and Lambtons and set up the Maxim Brewery at Rainton Bridge, where it still operates.A separate set of local entrepreneurs decided to resurrect the Vaux brand itself. They acquired the trademark in 2015, and set up a microbrewery and tap room on Monk Street in Monkwearmouth in 2018. It has since set up a new brewery on Charles Street near St Peter%u2019s Church due to growing sales.And so under two different guises, Vaux and its beers live on. The smell of hops no longer wafts across the city centre, but the beer is on sale across the city.