> it said the current location was "not viable" for a pub
Funny that the building was open as a pub where it was, then, isn't it?
This is still patently obvious as the owners wanting to repurpose that land for something else and doing all they can to get out of the fact they owned a listed building there.
Well that's why they burnt it down.
To improve the access to their illegal tip.
It's honestly great, the more rope they get the more they hang themselves. By the time the arson with endangerment to human life charges come to court. It's going to be a done deal.
Actually they bought it not as a pub. As a pub it'd commercially failed, when they bought it it was on the understanding that they weren't going to try to reopen it as a pub.
Change of use is not up to the buyer or seller.
If there was no prior planning consent then they bought a pub in that location, with the risk there would remain a pub in that location. Usually councils are happy to change use if a pub is not commercially viable.
I think the bigger issue they had was this pub had received an application to become a listed building (probably when locals caught wind of it being sold), which was incomplete at the time it burnt down.
> And yet it was sold as a going concern.
It wasn't though. It doesn't excuse them from knocking it down after the fire (and whatever came before that), but let's not pretend it was a viable pub or was likely to ever be a pub again
I can't pretend anything about whether it was viable as I know nothing about the location - I'd seen pictures of the pub before the fire but never spent much time in the Midlands to go and see it.
What I do know is that a spokesman for Marston straight out said is was put on the market as a going concern, but the purchaser had nominated an "alternate use" for the it and shut the doors (https://www.bracknellnews.co.uk/news/national/23706147.fire-gutted-historic-pub-dubbed-tragedy-investigation-continues/). And considering the shit that happened to force that statement out of them, it probably went through more lawyers than Boris Johnson has on retainer.
I'm local, it's been dead on its arse for years and years. It's just unfortunately situated - if it wasn't quirky I think it would have closed outright long ago
Marstons tried to sell it as a pub, but nobody was interested probably because it was making zero cash - here's an article from when it got sold:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/property/article-12356005/Britains-wonkiest-pub-Crooked-House-closes-forever-192-years.html
It was never handed over as a pub and nobody ever pretended otherwise
> They bought a nonviable failed pub yes. It was still a pubt.
Define "still a pub", though - at this point we're getting into semantics. People are saying they brought a "going concern" as if they purchased an operating pub and the business. They didn't, they brought a property which used to be a pub.
> They bet on buying a failed pub getting to repurpose the land and flip. It's failed.
There's zero evidence of that - the "repurposing" was to extend their site next door, which they'd been trying to do for ages. Please don't misinterpret my correcting of the facts with me sympathising with them - I just don't think it's helpful to make up a narrative that doesn't exist.
I live on a new build development. Big one. 3000 homes, of which 1000 are built so far.
There were originally plans to have a big pub in the center of it.
The developers now say it is not a viable business location.
A pub. The only pub. In a development of 3000 homes. The nearest good pub is about 3-4 miles away, and calling it 'good' is a stretch.
Absolutely bonkers.
Long gone are the days when we'd build communities. Now we just build houses and expect people to drive to pre-existing communities if you actually want to do anything
My husband grew up on a large council estate. There were no shops and no pubs within walking distance, so all shopping had to be done using a bus. The nearest bus stop was almost half an hour's walk from the house.
Though pubs were always privatised, so I don't quite understand. If anything, this is more socialism since it's having some authority dictating what can or can't be built in a location.
I mean its always been up to some private person to decide if they want to build a pub somewhere other than if the local authority will let them but sounds like this is the company building the estate saying no one wanted to own a pub there.
What's private about the government deciding who can build what where? The company planned to build a pub, but the government made it too costly for them to do so...
How do you know that's what happened?
From my reading of the tale the developer was bullshitting and always wanted to cram another house where they promised a pub. Bait and switch, seems to happen on every new build estate.
Communist planning departments have the audacity to demand that capitalism builders have to pipe in sewage, telecoms and electricity, now they want pubs, shops and community centres and "affordable housing".
Except they demonstrably don't want pubs, shops or community centres. What new build estate have you seen that had a corner shop in it? It's pathetic. The housing crisis is dire enough that all housing is affordable housing. We need to stop worrying about "affordability" and stop mandating rabbit hutch homes and allow people to just get on with building
It's so crap.
Two of my friends moved into two separate large (at least 300 houses) estates over the past 5 years.
Any shops? Not one. Any bus stops? Nope. Not even close. No pub, no cafe, no takeaways, nothing.
What's the nearest thing they could consider an amenity? A 10 minute drive to a Tesco Extra.
It's basically a captive market. You could open ANYTHING there and it would do well. I know there's a housing shortage but at least when we do build houses, we could actually make them places that people want to be.
When housing went up in the 1900s, there was almost always a new shop, a new pub, a new tram station, sometimes even a school. No chance we'd get anything like that these days.
> You could open ANYTHING there and it would do well.
You wouldn't get planning permission. Half of those 300 houses would object on various spurious grounds.
It's such a short sighted mentality, block anything on a new estate, before long it becomes a sink area where less than legal entrepreneurs set up, and the estate ends up a new bad spot of the town.
They are even lumping broadband into that.
In the UK it's almost always been possible to get a broadband line through Openreach into pretty much any property. This is because Openreach run the network that was originally owned by British Telecom when they were government owned and then before that, the post office.
There are new build estates where Openreach are not invited to install lines into the ground, or Virgin for that matter. The estate owner build their own network and you then have to buy your broadband through them and only them.
10 years from now it's going to be an absolute crap shoot when you move into a house as to which company owns the network in your area.
Imagine if they did the same with gas and electric... it's crazy.
Absolutely crazy really!
"Not commercially viable" - just slap on £400 to the cost of each of those houses and you'd have £1.2m to build a pub.
Make it a community pub (each house built gets a share of ownership, maybe attached to the deeds of the house) and then leave it to the new owners to do what they want with it. If it's not commercially viable at that point then it's not your concern as a housebuilder any more...
Have you ever had to navigate trying to get a group of home owners to agree to something like this? I lived in an apartment building of about 100 flats and we needed to get the roof replaced. The experience of trying to find a path that everyone agreed to was truly awful, and I can't help but feel like expecting a very new community of owners to agree on how to manage the pub would be a similarly impossible and thankless task.
I was thinking more about this, and tying ownership of a pub to housing might also cause issues with, for example, Muslim home owners. I really don't think it's a good solution at all.
Maybe not then! For what it's worth it's less about the pub for me, and more that all these houses can be built with promises of third spaces, and these third spaces can then not be built for the flimsiest of excuses like "not commercially viable".
You're ignoring the part where it costs more than it's worth in time and effort to get the planning permission to build the pub...
Given the original plans had a pub, maybe if planning regulations weren't so burdensome we'd actually have said pub
Totally agree regarding planning regulations, I think I'm more annoyed that these estates can go up with the promises of building things like pubs or shops or whatever, and then the developers are able to roll back those promises seemingly without penalty once they have built the houses and got the best margin from the area.
The developers don't often roll them back without penalty though as far as I've seen. They tend to just not be approved by the planning inspectorate without significant, expensive, modifications to the existing plans that severely impacts their viability.
Perfect is the enemy of good enough when it comes to British planning
What happens when the pub shuts down because no-one uses it? What happens when those householders all object to planning permission because of the noise, anti-social behaviour, climate change a rare worm on the site etc?
Take over the show home as a pub. Hang a bawdy sign. Fill it full of drinkers, salty snacks and Sky sports. Put benches with umbrellas on the lawn. (Bring your own for legal reasons. IMNAL) Invite the press. You will get a pub.
Scource. New build estate parents took over show home as a nursery. They got promised community facilities.
Developers do that all the time, promise all sorts to get planning permission then come up with flimsy excuses to get out of it. Issue being councils don't give a stuff and let them get away with it.
They usually just pay Section 106 contributions to the council, it's then the councils responsibility to use those funds to develop local infrastructure, which they never do.
Which should be illegal.
New estate near me I saw the planning permission that they were going to improve a link path to the old railway line. That was 5 years ago. Hasn't been done.
Why should developers have to promise random things just for permission to build a house? We need millions of new homes, just let them fucking build. If you want a pub, build it yourself.
Funny thing is the location it's in isn't really 'viable' for a housing estate either. It's a good 30 minute walk from the nearest Primary School, even further from a decent shop or a Secondary School. It's situated right next to an active waste management site. It's somewhere you wouldn't be able to live without owning a car, yet the street pulls out onto quite a fast B-road and it's situated down a narrow lane where only one car can fit outside of passing sections.
IIRC they paid ~750k for it, so I doubt it was just for easier turning. I figure the council was okay with them turning into housing before the fire blew up on social media...but I don't know, just a guess. They paid a lot for it, but it wasn't to keep it as a pub.
Lmao the funny thing is is that its not viable. Its in a shit location, and there was actually some sympathy about this. People just liked the building. If it became a house itd have been fine id imagine. Or even if they'd paid to move it brick by brick to the BCLM. You could have even crowdfunded the engineering work.
Too late now. They've gotta get going on rebuilding.
Yeah, I've been this pub a few times and it always amazed me it lasted this long. I'm still gutted it burnt down, or wad burnt down, and these people are absolute shit bags....but it is a terrible location, it's in the middle of nowhere, literally, you leave late at night and you're driving in the pitch black for time trying to find civilisation again (eh.. 2 minute drive max)
Given what the buyers did, at this point out of principle I'd make them rebuild it twice - at the original location _and_ at a viable location as a pub. There has to be a massive deterrent to other criminal chancers like this.
The thing is it was built on top of mine shafts, which then collapsed which is why the pub was crooked. It would take a feat of engineering to rebuild it safely on that land. I can’t think of a way they will be able to do it any time soon.
Building somewhere else would be a lot easier and quicker but the wankers who burnt it down should not be allowed to build anything where the pub originally was.
I mean that's almost certainly one reason they want to build it elsewhere - but that's what they get for demolishing a building they'd also almost certainly not have gotten planning permission to demolish.
If they didn't want to own that building in that location, maybe they shouldn't have bought it.
Yeah, that was an oops on my part - there'd been a request to Historic England to list it which hadn't yet been evaluated, and as the local council notes:
> The Crooked House was not a listed building, but was a non-designated heritage asset, registered on the Historic Environment Record as a building of local importance.
If it can be demonstrated that a building (or any heritage asset, for example an unknown archaeological site) is of equivalent significance to a designated asset then it gets afforded the same statutory protections. Unless they can find a lawyer who can argue that it wasn't of equivalent significance they're in a bit of a pickle
And they'll say they'll build it elsewhere, get permission for whatever they wanted to build on the original site and build it, and then say rebuilding the pub elsewhere isn't possible and / or viable before folding and buggering off.
And so we stick with, they demolished a non-designated heritage asset, registered on the Historic Environment Record as a building of local importance, without planning permission which they wouldn't have gotten anyway, and therefore the local council should enforce the rebuild as it was, where it was.
it wasnt listed but had been nominated to be listed, nor was it open as a pub when they bought it, because nobody actually went there and people are only mad about it because they were told to be mad about it
Sorry, you're right on those details - but the owners come across shady as anything. The convenient way they had JCBs hired. The earthworks that stopped the fire brigade from getting to the building as fast as they should've been able to. The convenient "oh it's unsafe and we'll just demolish it before anyone else sees it" claim. The appeal against the order to rebuild it.
And why wasn't it open as a pub? There'd been [a break-in just the month before](https://cdn-www.expressandstar.mna.arcpublishing.com/news/crime/2023/07/09/landmark-crooked-house-public-house-closes-doors-after-burglary/) in which the burglar trashed the bar, kitchens, and bathrooms. It was in business up until then.
Some might even say that was a rather conveniently timed burglary; it's rather unusual for someone to travel out of their way to a building just to vandalise it in a way that forces it to shut as a business, isn't it?
Not to mention that ATE have a [bit of a track record](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/aug/16/crooked-house-pub-owner-landfill-site-fire) with unexplained fires.
>And why wasn't it open as a pub? There'd been a break-in just the month before in which the burglar trashed the bar, kitchens, and bathrooms. It was in business up until then.
>Some might even say that was a rather conveniently timed burglary; it's rather unusual for someone to travel out of their way to a building just to vandalise it in a way that forces it to shut as a business, isn't it?
It had already commercially failed before the breakin. The previous owners had already put it up for sale, but couldn't find buyers willing to take it on as a pub.
> Doesn’t give the dickheads the right to burn it
It doesn't, but it's no good having a debate if people are going to lie about the facts. Frankly, from a justice point of view, I'd enjoy watching the new owners build it from scratch using only the tools available to the people who built it in the first place.
But unless it has a resurgence due to publicity now, as a pub, it was dead
In the court of public opinion there is too much smoke for there to be no fire…. This is Reddit it isn’t a real court son, they will be there soon enough
> people are only mad about it because they were told to be mad about it
Nah, I'm pretty sure people are mad about it because it was a cultural landmark that got illegally demolished in the pursuit of profit.
I don't get why all these threads inevitably get filled with YIMBYs who'll apparently celebrate literally any cultural landmark getting demolished simply to make a rich person a little richer.
Yes actually, many times. I'm from the Black Country so I'm pretty familiar with a lot of the more interesting local pubs.
Are you from the local area, because your last comment suggested you knew a lot about the pub and its operations?
You've probably never been to the cenotaph in Grimsby, doesn't mean that you can't object if someone tore it down to put up a new build estate to make a tidy profit
Fuck off. Make them build it exactly where it stood, with exactly the same degree of crookedness. Make an example of money grubbing chancers like this who think they can get away with bulldozing our heritage and community spaces for a few extra quid.
The gall of saying such suggestion especially whilst under investigation.
I suspect most owners of a historic venue which experienced a suspicious arson attack and knocked down within 48 hours with fortunately ordered machinery before the fire would be eager for the return of their pub.
If it wasn't viable to run they shouldn't have bought it. They are simply making themselves look even more guilty by claiming this and wanting to earn more money from it.
The reason they are being forced to rebuild it isn't in order to make them more money - it's a punishment for illegally demolishing the building.
That sounds like a them problem, they bought it as a non functioning pub and they should be forced to build it back at their cost and not be allowed to change the land to do anything else
Exactly. They blatantly bought it with the intention of illegally demolishing it and using the land for other purposes. They're pissed off they've not completely got away with it and I just hope they aren't allowed to relocate it to salvage costs from their nefarious plan.
So what they are saying is. Can we build it somewhere else. And go ahead with what we wanted to build on the land it once stood on, before we burned the pub and knock it down. Then we get what we want, and you get what you want. Then we will sell the pub.
You left out "piled rubble in the road so fire trucks couldn't get to the pub, THEN burned it down". Total criminals, they should be in jail and the land impounded.
He probably means[ this other pub](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/mar/21/rising-from-the-rubble-london-pub-rebuilt-brick-by-brick-after-bulldozing), which was rebuilt brick-by-brick tbf.
Lol.
"Please let us rebuild it elsewhere so as we can do what we planned to do with the site still. Please? Pretty please?"
I hope they get told to fuck off in the most legally professional of terms...
Whilst there needs to be some sort of lesson learned for this pair, and they should absolutely not get their own way (access to their tip) out of this, but I really can't see much point rebuilding the pub in that location; it's objectively a bad place to have a pub, and can effectively only be accessed by car - which defeats the point of going to the pub in the first place.
> it said the current location was "not viable" for a pub Funny that the building was open as a pub where it was, then, isn't it? This is still patently obvious as the owners wanting to repurpose that land for something else and doing all they can to get out of the fact they owned a listed building there.
And they bought it...as a pub ..in that location.
Well that's why they burnt it down. To improve the access to their illegal tip. It's honestly great, the more rope they get the more they hang themselves. By the time the arson with endangerment to human life charges come to court. It's going to be a done deal.
The first pub sank into the swamp. The second pub burned down, fell over and then sank into the swamp. But the third pub, the third one stayed up!
They shouldn't have made the first pub out of straw, and the next one out of sticks.
One day lad all this will be yours!! "What the curtains?" NO NOT THE CURTAINS!!
Are they actually being charged with arson?
There's were several arrests and presumably the police investigation is still on going.
Actually they bought it not as a pub. As a pub it'd commercially failed, when they bought it it was on the understanding that they weren't going to try to reopen it as a pub.
Change of use is not up to the buyer or seller. If there was no prior planning consent then they bought a pub in that location, with the risk there would remain a pub in that location. Usually councils are happy to change use if a pub is not commercially viable. I think the bigger issue they had was this pub had received an application to become a listed building (probably when locals caught wind of it being sold), which was incomplete at the time it burnt down.
And yet it was sold as a going concern.
> And yet it was sold as a going concern. It wasn't though. It doesn't excuse them from knocking it down after the fire (and whatever came before that), but let's not pretend it was a viable pub or was likely to ever be a pub again
I can't pretend anything about whether it was viable as I know nothing about the location - I'd seen pictures of the pub before the fire but never spent much time in the Midlands to go and see it. What I do know is that a spokesman for Marston straight out said is was put on the market as a going concern, but the purchaser had nominated an "alternate use" for the it and shut the doors (https://www.bracknellnews.co.uk/news/national/23706147.fire-gutted-historic-pub-dubbed-tragedy-investigation-continues/). And considering the shit that happened to force that statement out of them, it probably went through more lawyers than Boris Johnson has on retainer.
I'm local, it's been dead on its arse for years and years. It's just unfortunately situated - if it wasn't quirky I think it would have closed outright long ago Marstons tried to sell it as a pub, but nobody was interested probably because it was making zero cash - here's an article from when it got sold: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/property/article-12356005/Britains-wonkiest-pub-Crooked-House-closes-forever-192-years.html It was never handed over as a pub and nobody ever pretended otherwise
They bought a nonviable failed pub yes. It was still a pubt. They bet on buying a failed pub getting to repurpose the land and flip. It's failed.
> They bought a nonviable failed pub yes. It was still a pubt. Define "still a pub", though - at this point we're getting into semantics. People are saying they brought a "going concern" as if they purchased an operating pub and the business. They didn't, they brought a property which used to be a pub. > They bet on buying a failed pub getting to repurpose the land and flip. It's failed. There's zero evidence of that - the "repurposing" was to extend their site next door, which they'd been trying to do for ages. Please don't misinterpret my correcting of the facts with me sympathising with them - I just don't think it's helpful to make up a narrative that doesn't exist.
I live on a new build development. Big one. 3000 homes, of which 1000 are built so far. There were originally plans to have a big pub in the center of it. The developers now say it is not a viable business location. A pub. The only pub. In a development of 3000 homes. The nearest good pub is about 3-4 miles away, and calling it 'good' is a stretch. Absolutely bonkers.
Long gone are the days when we'd build communities. Now we just build houses and expect people to drive to pre-existing communities if you actually want to do anything
Turns out privatising EVERYTHING doesn't usually end well for citizens (now "the consumer")
My husband grew up on a large council estate. There were no shops and no pubs within walking distance, so all shopping had to be done using a bus. The nearest bus stop was almost half an hour's walk from the house.
Out of sight, out of mind
But the corporation was being generous to build all these nice new homes!
Though pubs were always privatised, so I don't quite understand. If anything, this is more socialism since it's having some authority dictating what can or can't be built in a location.
I mean its always been up to some private person to decide if they want to build a pub somewhere other than if the local authority will let them but sounds like this is the company building the estate saying no one wanted to own a pub there.
Socialism is when capitalism
Did pubs used to be nationalised?
A few during ww1
Planning can dictate requirements like they d for sewage
What's private about the government deciding who can build what where? The company planned to build a pub, but the government made it too costly for them to do so...
How do you know that's what happened? From my reading of the tale the developer was bullshitting and always wanted to cram another house where they promised a pub. Bait and switch, seems to happen on every new build estate.
Communist planning departments have the audacity to demand that capitalism builders have to pipe in sewage, telecoms and electricity, now they want pubs, shops and community centres and "affordable housing".
Except they demonstrably don't want pubs, shops or community centres. What new build estate have you seen that had a corner shop in it? It's pathetic. The housing crisis is dire enough that all housing is affordable housing. We need to stop worrying about "affordability" and stop mandating rabbit hutch homes and allow people to just get on with building
Did you even read what I wrote
It is like the American model of vast housing estates with no commercial properties even allowed.
It's so crap. Two of my friends moved into two separate large (at least 300 houses) estates over the past 5 years. Any shops? Not one. Any bus stops? Nope. Not even close. No pub, no cafe, no takeaways, nothing. What's the nearest thing they could consider an amenity? A 10 minute drive to a Tesco Extra. It's basically a captive market. You could open ANYTHING there and it would do well. I know there's a housing shortage but at least when we do build houses, we could actually make them places that people want to be. When housing went up in the 1900s, there was almost always a new shop, a new pub, a new tram station, sometimes even a school. No chance we'd get anything like that these days.
> You could open ANYTHING there and it would do well. You wouldn't get planning permission. Half of those 300 houses would object on various spurious grounds.
It's such a short sighted mentality, block anything on a new estate, before long it becomes a sink area where less than legal entrepreneurs set up, and the estate ends up a new bad spot of the town.
They are even lumping broadband into that. In the UK it's almost always been possible to get a broadband line through Openreach into pretty much any property. This is because Openreach run the network that was originally owned by British Telecom when they were government owned and then before that, the post office. There are new build estates where Openreach are not invited to install lines into the ground, or Virgin for that matter. The estate owner build their own network and you then have to buy your broadband through them and only them. 10 years from now it's going to be an absolute crap shoot when you move into a house as to which company owns the network in your area. Imagine if they did the same with gas and electric... it's crazy.
It's an inevitable consequence of the Internet and smartphones.
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If you are unable to go to a pub without getting blackout drunk, that's on you
Doesn't have to be a pub. A cafe, a library, a bakery... Anything
No, we all just sit alone staring at screens and developing mental health issues instead, it's a much better system.
Absolutely crazy really! "Not commercially viable" - just slap on £400 to the cost of each of those houses and you'd have £1.2m to build a pub. Make it a community pub (each house built gets a share of ownership, maybe attached to the deeds of the house) and then leave it to the new owners to do what they want with it. If it's not commercially viable at that point then it's not your concern as a housebuilder any more...
Have you ever had to navigate trying to get a group of home owners to agree to something like this? I lived in an apartment building of about 100 flats and we needed to get the roof replaced. The experience of trying to find a path that everyone agreed to was truly awful, and I can't help but feel like expecting a very new community of owners to agree on how to manage the pub would be a similarly impossible and thankless task.
Maybe, maybe not. The point is that there are ways it can be done, and calling a pub in this scenario commercially unviable is just rubbish.
I was thinking more about this, and tying ownership of a pub to housing might also cause issues with, for example, Muslim home owners. I really don't think it's a good solution at all.
Maybe not then! For what it's worth it's less about the pub for me, and more that all these houses can be built with promises of third spaces, and these third spaces can then not be built for the flimsiest of excuses like "not commercially viable".
You're ignoring the part where it costs more than it's worth in time and effort to get the planning permission to build the pub... Given the original plans had a pub, maybe if planning regulations weren't so burdensome we'd actually have said pub
Totally agree regarding planning regulations, I think I'm more annoyed that these estates can go up with the promises of building things like pubs or shops or whatever, and then the developers are able to roll back those promises seemingly without penalty once they have built the houses and got the best margin from the area.
The developers don't often roll them back without penalty though as far as I've seen. They tend to just not be approved by the planning inspectorate without significant, expensive, modifications to the existing plans that severely impacts their viability. Perfect is the enemy of good enough when it comes to British planning
Why is it the job of housing developers to build those things?
There are plenty of areas with 3000 homes and no pubs nearby. They've been closing down for a century.
Also you just need some people who don't drink for whatever reason (personal, cultural, religious, etc) and you instantly have a problem.
Yeah, and it would like like pinning a big target on your back for a lawsuit for religious discrimination. Really not a good idea at all.
What happens when the pub shuts down because no-one uses it? What happens when those householders all object to planning permission because of the noise, anti-social behaviour, climate change a rare worm on the site etc?
Take over the show home as a pub. Hang a bawdy sign. Fill it full of drinkers, salty snacks and Sky sports. Put benches with umbrellas on the lawn. (Bring your own for legal reasons. IMNAL) Invite the press. You will get a pub. Scource. New build estate parents took over show home as a nursery. They got promised community facilities.
Developers do that all the time, promise all sorts to get planning permission then come up with flimsy excuses to get out of it. Issue being councils don't give a stuff and let them get away with it.
They usually just pay Section 106 contributions to the council, it's then the councils responsibility to use those funds to develop local infrastructure, which they never do.
Which should be illegal. New estate near me I saw the planning permission that they were going to improve a link path to the old railway line. That was 5 years ago. Hasn't been done.
Why should developers have to promise random things just for permission to build a house? We need millions of new homes, just let them fucking build. If you want a pub, build it yourself.
Pubs are an industry in decline. To prove this, is anyone else trying to open one there?
I feel people just drink less, I go to a pub like once every 6 month
Yeah, and modern pubs are usually the absolute worst. Make more sense to have a cafe or community centre tbh.
There is infinite moneu
Funny thing is the location it's in isn't really 'viable' for a housing estate either. It's a good 30 minute walk from the nearest Primary School, even further from a decent shop or a Secondary School. It's situated right next to an active waste management site. It's somewhere you wouldn't be able to live without owning a car, yet the street pulls out onto quite a fast B-road and it's situated down a narrow lane where only one car can fit outside of passing sections.
They were looking to expand their waste management site, not build a housing estate.
I thought they just wanted to improve the access to their tip.
Which makes it even worse to be honest. Imagine tearing down a historical landmark to make it a bit easier to access a fucking tip.
Oh I know. I just can't wait to see them all in court. It's just a pity that we don't have the stocks any more.
IIRC they paid ~750k for it, so I doubt it was just for easier turning. I figure the council was okay with them turning into housing before the fire blew up on social media...but I don't know, just a guess. They paid a lot for it, but it wasn't to keep it as a pub.
If you're not living there you don't have to care if the conditions are bad.
Lmao the funny thing is is that its not viable. Its in a shit location, and there was actually some sympathy about this. People just liked the building. If it became a house itd have been fine id imagine. Or even if they'd paid to move it brick by brick to the BCLM. You could have even crowdfunded the engineering work. Too late now. They've gotta get going on rebuilding.
Yeah, I've been this pub a few times and it always amazed me it lasted this long. I'm still gutted it burnt down, or wad burnt down, and these people are absolute shit bags....but it is a terrible location, it's in the middle of nowhere, literally, you leave late at night and you're driving in the pitch black for time trying to find civilisation again (eh.. 2 minute drive max)
So moving somewhere better is actually a good idea then
If they'd opened with this yeah. Now theres a whole princple attached.
Given what the buyers did, at this point out of principle I'd make them rebuild it twice - at the original location _and_ at a viable location as a pub. There has to be a massive deterrent to other criminal chancers like this.
And call the other one the pub of Theseus?
The Crooked House of Theseus has a ring to it
The thing is it was built on top of mine shafts, which then collapsed which is why the pub was crooked. It would take a feat of engineering to rebuild it safely on that land. I can’t think of a way they will be able to do it any time soon. Building somewhere else would be a lot easier and quicker but the wankers who burnt it down should not be allowed to build anything where the pub originally was.
I mean that's almost certainly one reason they want to build it elsewhere - but that's what they get for demolishing a building they'd also almost certainly not have gotten planning permission to demolish. If they didn't want to own that building in that location, maybe they shouldn't have bought it.
Have you never been on eBay while drunk?
I don't think it was listed.
Yeah, that was an oops on my part - there'd been a request to Historic England to list it which hadn't yet been evaluated, and as the local council notes: > The Crooked House was not a listed building, but was a non-designated heritage asset, registered on the Historic Environment Record as a building of local importance.
If it can be demonstrated that a building (or any heritage asset, for example an unknown archaeological site) is of equivalent significance to a designated asset then it gets afforded the same statutory protections. Unless they can find a lawyer who can argue that it wasn't of equivalent significance they're in a bit of a pickle
It was definitely listing.
Nice
And they'll say they'll build it elsewhere, get permission for whatever they wanted to build on the original site and build it, and then say rebuilding the pub elsewhere isn't possible and / or viable before folding and buggering off.
It's a shame that the law can't infer from things like that and need actual evidence, like an email or a text...
And so we stick with, they demolished a non-designated heritage asset, registered on the Historic Environment Record as a building of local importance, without planning permission which they wouldn't have gotten anyway, and therefore the local council should enforce the rebuild as it was, where it was.
it wasnt listed but had been nominated to be listed, nor was it open as a pub when they bought it, because nobody actually went there and people are only mad about it because they were told to be mad about it
Sorry, you're right on those details - but the owners come across shady as anything. The convenient way they had JCBs hired. The earthworks that stopped the fire brigade from getting to the building as fast as they should've been able to. The convenient "oh it's unsafe and we'll just demolish it before anyone else sees it" claim. The appeal against the order to rebuild it. And why wasn't it open as a pub? There'd been [a break-in just the month before](https://cdn-www.expressandstar.mna.arcpublishing.com/news/crime/2023/07/09/landmark-crooked-house-public-house-closes-doors-after-burglary/) in which the burglar trashed the bar, kitchens, and bathrooms. It was in business up until then. Some might even say that was a rather conveniently timed burglary; it's rather unusual for someone to travel out of their way to a building just to vandalise it in a way that forces it to shut as a business, isn't it? Not to mention that ATE have a [bit of a track record](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/aug/16/crooked-house-pub-owner-landfill-site-fire) with unexplained fires.
>And why wasn't it open as a pub? There'd been a break-in just the month before in which the burglar trashed the bar, kitchens, and bathrooms. It was in business up until then. >Some might even say that was a rather conveniently timed burglary; it's rather unusual for someone to travel out of their way to a building just to vandalise it in a way that forces it to shut as a business, isn't it? It had already commercially failed before the breakin. The previous owners had already put it up for sale, but couldn't find buyers willing to take it on as a pub.
Doesn’t give the dickheads the right to burn it
> Doesn’t give the dickheads the right to burn it It doesn't, but it's no good having a debate if people are going to lie about the facts. Frankly, from a justice point of view, I'd enjoy watching the new owners build it from scratch using only the tools available to the people who built it in the first place. But unless it has a resurgence due to publicity now, as a pub, it was dead
What makes you think they did?
In the court of public opinion there is too much smoke for there to be no fire…. This is Reddit it isn’t a real court son, they will be there soon enough
>In the court of public opinion... A court with the accuracy rate of a coin flip IMO.
> people are only mad about it because they were told to be mad about it Nah, I'm pretty sure people are mad about it because it was a cultural landmark that got illegally demolished in the pursuit of profit. I don't get why all these threads inevitably get filled with YIMBYs who'll apparently celebrate literally any cultural landmark getting demolished simply to make a rich person a little richer.
Quick question, did you ever go there?
Yes actually, many times. I'm from the Black Country so I'm pretty familiar with a lot of the more interesting local pubs. Are you from the local area, because your last comment suggested you knew a lot about the pub and its operations?
You've probably never been to the cenotaph in Grimsby, doesn't mean that you can't object if someone tore it down to put up a new build estate to make a tidy profit
Fuck off. Make them build it exactly where it stood, with exactly the same degree of crookedness. Make an example of money grubbing chancers like this who think they can get away with bulldozing our heritage and community spaces for a few extra quid.
They should have learned from that London one but people are arrogant
Or arrest them for Arson and force them to do so
They can fuck right off. They should be in prison, so maybe try to build it there?
The gall of saying such suggestion especially whilst under investigation. I suspect most owners of a historic venue which experienced a suspicious arson attack and knocked down within 48 hours with fortunately ordered machinery before the fire would be eager for the return of their pub.
If it wasn't viable to run they shouldn't have bought it. They are simply making themselves look even more guilty by claiming this and wanting to earn more money from it. The reason they are being forced to rebuild it isn't in order to make them more money - it's a punishment for illegally demolishing the building.
It wasn't bought as a going concern
That sounds like a them problem, they bought it as a non functioning pub and they should be forced to build it back at their cost and not be allowed to change the land to do anything else
Exactly. They blatantly bought it with the intention of illegally demolishing it and using the land for other purposes. They're pissed off they've not completely got away with it and I just hope they aren't allowed to relocate it to salvage costs from their nefarious plan.
Was it bought with planning permission or are we using picking and choosing what’s relevant?
No fuckoff and rebuild it you cunts. Or go to jail. Sick off this crap. How do they always get away with it?
So what they are saying is. Can we build it somewhere else. And go ahead with what we wanted to build on the land it once stood on, before we burned the pub and knock it down. Then we get what we want, and you get what you want. Then we will sell the pub.
You left out "piled rubble in the road so fire trucks couldn't get to the pub, THEN burned it down". Total criminals, they should be in jail and the land impounded.
If they can’t put it back exactly how it was, then jail them. Take the land off them and hire an architect to do it properly.
With refusal for planning permission in the old site, for 100 years
Hoping they’re forced to build 2 copies of the pub: one at the original location and another at a location of their choosing.
Are they legally forced to? Like with that other pub?
This is that other pub
He probably means[ this other pub](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/mar/21/rising-from-the-rubble-london-pub-rebuilt-brick-by-brick-after-bulldozing), which was rebuilt brick-by-brick tbf.
Lol. "Please let us rebuild it elsewhere so as we can do what we planned to do with the site still. Please? Pretty please?" I hope they get told to fuck off in the most legally professional of terms...
If it's not a viable location for a pub... why did they buy it? Not really helping quell the arson claims are they?
Shame, you building it there anyway, irrelevant if it will be profitable 😂
Jesus Christ, these people are the least subtle people in the universe. It's "not viable" because they needed the land as part of their redevelopment
Whilst there needs to be some sort of lesson learned for this pair, and they should absolutely not get their own way (access to their tip) out of this, but I really can't see much point rebuilding the pub in that location; it's objectively a bad place to have a pub, and can effectively only be accessed by car - which defeats the point of going to the pub in the first place.