July 23, 2025

Closure at last

Hello,

It’s been a very long few weeks, sorry. My brain has not been in the newsletter writing game because the pub is currently being renovated.

It’s been a long time coming - we’re not absolutely sure but it’s at least 40 years since the place last had any work done. It’s also a big investment by the pub company - north of £400,000 on doing somewhere as big as this up.

If I try to pretend I’m not me and look at it from the outside it’s a huge vote of confidence in me that they’re finally doing it. Everyone said it’d never happen, having been promised for a long time and never quite getting over the line - strings of short-term managers in between too-long periods of holding ones didn’t invite confidence - but then they also said I’d be gone after two days and here I still am, seven months later.

I have, if I let myself think this, probably exceeded expectations. I had to fight really hard to get this refurb and for all (or at least most) of what I wanted to be included. There’s a likely second phase to it, if I can prove that the first investment was worth it by driving the sales well up - which should be very much possible.

Going from having a pub that looked, frankly, like it had been abandoned during a zombie apocalypse from the outside and that had toilets which allowed you to experience rain indoors to one that looks really nice and has functional ceilings is going to make a huge difference. My pub’s on a main road and so has a massive shop window through which it has, frankly, looked fucking awful for years now.

Not that it’s coming back looking much different. What I’ve been telling everyone is that it’ll be like before but without the holes. Literally speaking, in some cases, since we’re going to cut out Bill’s Hole and frame it.

“What,” you might ask, “is Bill’s Hole?” Well it’s a bit of carpet - and floorboards and tile where a (now) little old guy called Bill puts his feet when he’s sitting in his seat in the pub. Then he gets excited watching horse racing and shuffles his feet back and forth, which over the course of about sixty years (definitely more than fifty) has worn through the carpet, the floorboards and some of the tiles beneath.

I bought it a fake blue plaque when I first arrived at the pub but the hole itself has to be preserved. Along with a few other random bits, like a square of the carpet in the big bar that’s being ripped out, in tribute to the well-remembered customers past who drank there. The dark panelling in the big bar is not being painted teal or magnolia or some crap, it’s been restored and revarnished. The bar’s being re-leathered (well, not real leather but a hardwearing composite equivalent) not having a formica or granite top dumped on it.

I have, in a moment of reckless insanity, told the people doing the beer font refits to order brass t-bars rather than plain chrome because they will fit the aesthetic better even if they’re both more expensive and a cleaning nightmare. If that’s my one moment of whimsy over pragmatism then I think I’m allowed it (or at least, no one’s told me off for it yet) in what’s been a gruelling seven-weeks-and-counting of trying to keep a building site open and functioning as a pub.

One of the problems with closing large parts of the pub is that it tends to make less money - even in a pub as macro as mine, having to close half the toilets (we do have another half but round the other side of the building) and providing an ambient soundtrack of hammering, drilling and grinding up concrete with a flavour of ceramic burning is not the atmosphere most people are looking for for a quiet pint.

So I can’t blame my customers for thinning out. I hope that they will come back - along with a lot of people - when we finish all this. I really believe the refurb wasn’t just something that will benefit the pub but incredibly necessary for its survival, especially the external work.

But earning no money for weeks on end (because I pay the staff before me and I’m not willing to cut anyone’s hours to the bone over what’s something I should be managing, either upwards or outwards) and living in a building site and working from early morning to late night every day with everyone mad at me constantly is taking a horrible toll on me. I’m not really very good at being nice to myself in any context but especially whenever I think “I can’t do this” but some time around 1am on Sunday night I did think I’d got there.

As it happens, I did manage to finish stripping the bar and moving everything down to the cellar, so now that can be laid into this week. Since we are, finally, fully closed for five days. On Friday night I have to clean everything and put the bar back together so we can reopen, which is a good thing. But I am dreading it.

I can’t be dreading it. This is what I wanted. This is what I spent months working to get. And it’s in the final stages now - in a lot of ways, the worst is over and it’s a downhill sprint to the end now. I should be getting excited. Instead I’m chewing off my nails and going weirder and weirder. No way out but through.

I’ve got a more excited newsletter to send, err, tomorrow (sorry! deadline!) about pub food and what I’m going to do with mine now the kitchen’s almost all in.

But it’s been a strange month-and-a-half and probably isn’t going to get any more normal too quickly. Me and the pub ghosts grumpily bundling into each other looking for somewhere no one’s digging up.

Soon the new beers will start going in, the toilets will be finished, the garden will suddenly come together, the planters will arrive for the front and the new/old pub sign will go up and this too shall pass because it has to eventually. In the meantime I’ll carry on dissociating into a Kevin McCloud state and saying “the tarmac pour was not straightforward” into a second camera.

See you tomorrow, with a much more upbeat one about tacos

Hazel