Unigate milk bottle

Description:

1 pint glass milk bottle from Unigate with an advert for PG Tips teabags.

Milk was delivered to your doorstep by the local milkman. Initially sealed with cardboard, later bottles came with foil tops in different colours for different types of milk. Sometimes these foil tops were pecked by birds!

Bottles, like this one from Unigate, often had the name of the dairy on the bottle to encourage people to return them so they could be cleaned and reused.

By 1975, 94% of milk was bottled, compared to about 4% in 2012. In the 1970s and 1980s milk bottles became popular for advertising with brands such as Kellog’s, Cadbury and PG Tips printing colour adverts on bottles. Forty million bottles a day were delivered to doorsteps in the early 1990s.