Who owns Young's?

A public stock market listing owns most of it, but the Young family still hold the shares that carry the votes.

Young’s is Young & Co.’s Brewery, P.L.C., a London pub company whose shares are publicly traded. That would normally mean no single owner. The catch is the share structure: the company has two classes of share, and only one of them votes. The family and the people connected to them hold a large block of the voting class, which is how a listed company stays under family influence.

It no longer brews. Despite the name, Young’s has not made its own beer since the second half of the 2000s.

What does the register show?

Young & Co.’s Brewery, P.L.C. is company number 00032762, incorporated on 17 November 1890 and registered at Copper House, 5 Garratt Lane, Wandsworth, London. It has been a listed company since 1898, and its shares now trade on the London Stock Exchange’s AIM market.

Because it is a listed company, it is exempt from the register of people with significant control that a normal private company files. So Companies House will not hand you a single named owner. What it confirms is the company’s existence, its age and its structure; the ownership question is answered by that structure and by the company’s own share disclosures.

Why the two share classes matter

Young’s has issued two classes of share: A ordinary shares, which carry the votes, and non-voting ordinary shares, which do not. As of its 2026 disclosures the company reported about 38 million voting A shares and about 23 million non-voting shares.

That split is the whole answer. A person can buy the non-voting shares and own a slice of the profits without owning any of the control. The votes sit with the A shares, and the Young family and connected holders own a large enough block of them to keep the company under family influence. Torquil Sligo-Young, a descendant of the family, sits on the board.

Does Young's still brew beer?

No. Young’s moved its brewing into a joint venture with Charles Wells, Wells & Young’s, in 2006, which shifted production from the Ram Brewery in Wandsworth to Bedford. It then sold its stake in that venture in 2011. Since then Young’s has been a pub and hotel company that does not brew its own beer; the Young’s-branded beers are made by others under licence.

How big is Young's?

Young’s runs around 280 pubs and hotels, mostly managed houses in London and the South of England. It grew in 2022 by buying the City Pub Group, and it is a managed-house operator rather than a tenanted pub estate, so most of its pubs are run by the company itself rather than leased to licensees.

Is Young's independent?

Not in the sense our verified independent badge means. It is a large, publicly listed pub company with a stock-market valuation and hundreds of houses, which is a long way from a proprietor-owned local.

But it is also not owned by a private equity fund, and that distinction is worth keeping. Control rests with a family through the voting shares, not with an investor buying and flipping the business. For some drinkers that family continuity is the next best thing to a free house, which is why our guide to Lincoln pubs that no pub company owns treats brewery and family-controlled pubs as their own category rather than lumping them in with the private-equity estates.

Questions people ask

Is Young's still family-owned?

Not owned outright, but family-controlled. The shares are publicly traded, so the family does not own all of Young’s. They do hold a large block of the voting A shares, and a family descendant sits on the board, so the family keeps effective control of the votes even though anyone can buy the non-voting shares.

Is Young's a chain?

It is a large listed pub company of around 280 houses, so by size it is not a local independent. It is not a national high-street chain in the fast-food sense either; it is a regional managed-pub operator concentrated in London and the South East.

Who owns the Young's beer brands now?

Young’s stopped brewing in the 2000s, so the beers sold under the Young’s name are produced by others under licence rather than by the pub company itself.

Last checked 21 September 2026. This article uses the Companies House record for Young & Co.’s Brewery, P.L.C. (company 00032762), the company’s own reported share capital and voting-rights figures, and public reporting of the Young family’s shareholding and the 2006 and 2011 brewing moves. What is not claimed: an exact current percentage of the votes held by the family, and an exact current pub count, both of which move. A listed company does not file the persons-with-significant-control register, so the control finding rests on the share structure and the company’s disclosures rather than a PSC filing. Ownership and estate sizes change, so if you spot something that needs correcting, email Highstreett and we will review it.