Urban 75


Thanks to you who liked The Sun and Doves. Will just point out that, had the pub been mine, really, as opposed to it being just a case of my being in the pocket of the pubco, it would have been much more than it managed to be.

I would have been able to invest much more in the premises than I was able - there would have been a roof terrace and letting rooms and awnings at the front and the exhibition programme, which was quite successful, would have continued past 2005 - and the place would have had a lot more pzazz than it did. The kitchen would have been completely rebuilt, there would have been a cold room and extraction and, actually, the plan I researched in 2003 to make the pub the first carbon neutral pub in the world might actually have come to pass. Back then S&NPC were totally recalcitrant and stubbornly reluctant to get involved in a scheme their projects manager said 'might set a precedent for all our refurbishments across the estate'.

A precedent that would have made S&NPC the leading pubco in Britain with an estate that generated no carbon. That would have been shit wouldn't it.

@stuff_it: The pubco make massive returns out of pubs. That is why pubs are closing everywhere - the pubco's take all the profit and leave nothing for the leaseholders. The leaseholders can't invest, because they've got nothing to put back in, the pubs get tatty, the customers abandon them for somewhere better appointed and the pubco evicts the tenant; gets a new one in who spendsa bunch of cash making the pub look better; it gets busier again - and hey presto the pubco's raking it back in again. Without spending a penny.

I went under because they were making £160K out of me while I was making nothing.

Read above. I predict it's going to become a Grand Union. They'll spend £300K on it and it will do £25K a week and they'll make £500K a year. It's not complicated; it's how the pub industry works.

Grand Union will then sell out all their pubs as a group to the biggest and most stupid pubco who will run them into the ground but the Grand Union bods will have become millionares in the process and a whole bunch more proper pubs will have been lost. Until the revolution...