Bevendean Co-op Pub

Community pubs are growing in popularity. We were proud to help the UK’s first community-owned estate pub get moving.

Over 30 community pubs have opened in the last decade, with the overwhelming majority in rural communities. Whilst there’s a (mostly hidden) story of deprivation and poverty in the countryside, it’s fair to say that the places leading the community ownership revolution in pubs are full of people with more time, skills and money than the average.

But if that community ownership revolution is to become the norm, it also needs to happen in places where the majority of people live and socialise – urban areas where pub owning companies are increasingly selling assets that have long been in the community for short-term private gain.

The Bevendean Hotel closed on police advice in 2010 leaving 18,000 people on the outskirts of Brighton facing a four-mile journey to the nearest pub. A committed group of activists mobilised and persuaded the East Brighton Trust to buy the pub to save it from developers. The Trust wanted to keep their options open and so ripped out all the fixtures and fittings in the process of converting the upstairs into flats to rent. They then invited applications from potential leaseholders.

The group needed a business plan to get to the bottom of whether a pub could be viable and convince the Trust they were the best option, so we helped draw together figures from other pubs, developed the business case for the pub as a whole and pulled it into a robust business plan which we helped the group present to the Trust.

They were successful in securing the lease but then they order flagyl online next day delivery faced a second problem. It would now cost around £200,000 to refit the building as a pub again, so the group embarked on a share issue which raised £55,000 from over 600 shareholders, with just £10 needed to buy a share. The group also secured SEIS tax relief, meaning investors could claim back half of their investment if they paid tax.

The pub is in one of the city’s less affluent areas, so the aim of the share issue wasn’t to raise all the money they needed but to demonstrate that the community was really behind having a pub again. Hard cash does that better than any pledge or petition. That meant that when we signposted the group to some grant funding, the commitment shown by the community gave the funders confidence to give an extra £100,000.

The pub refit is almost complete, complemented by volunteer labour and donated furniture and equipment, and we have continued to advise the pub on their governance and legal issues.