THE famous name of Malvern water made a welcome return to the shelves this week.

The familiar Malvern Water brand dried up after Coca-Cola pulled the plug on hundreds of years of tradition and closed the bottling plant at Colwall in November 2010.

The site has since been sold to property company Eagle One, which is to redevelop the site, effectively ending hopes of bottling there resuming.

But in the meantime bottling at the Holywell, a spring in Malvern Wells that has been used since 1558, has gone from strength to strength.

The Holywell Water Company took ownership of the spring and 19thcentury building formerly used by Schweppes in 2009, but has not been able to use the iconic town in its branding.

However that changed this week as delighted director Rhys Humm announced the official re-branding of the product as “Holywell Malvern Spring Water”.

He hopes the “subtle but significant”

change will help keep the historic name alive as well as promoting Malvern at a national level.

“The Holywell spring is indisputably the original source of Malvern water so it is fantastic that we can now include the prestigious Malvern name in our branding,” he said.

“It’s important that water from Malvern is still bottled and that the name and association is not lost forever.

“Our solicitors have done some fabulous work in registering this trademark and I hope that the public will be as happy as we are that we can use the term Malvern in relation to our pedigree water.”

Mr Humm will be unveiling the new branding to a wider audience during the Hotelympia show at London’s Excel from Sunday until Thursday, March 1.