They built a huge wind turbine, but can they bring Lawrence Weston’s last pub back from the dead?
“It hadn’t been looked after or invested in,” replies Roger Sabido, asked what the last pub in Lawrence Weston, the Giant Goram, was like.
“It was being allowed to decline by the pub company,” adds Sabido, a retired aerospace engineer who has lived in the area 40 years – long enough to remember when it had five thriving boozers.
The Giant Goram’s decline has steepened since it shut its doors for the final time in 2019 and became subject to a series of planning applications.
After metal security shutters were removed from the 1950s building a year or so ago – allegedly because its owners did not keep up with bills – vandalism worsened.
It now stands forlorn, windows lying splintered in the car park and distinctive copper roofing mostly ripped away, as the council’s development committee prepares to meet once again to discuss its fate.
In September, councillors deferred a decision on owner Hawkfield Homes’ latest application, to redevelop the Giant Goram with eight homes and a micropub, and tasked planners with drafting reasons to refuse it.
If that’s the decision at the development control A committee meeting on 23 October, the Save Our Giant Goram Campaign Group that Sabido is a member of is determined to resurrect the pub for the community’s benefit.
Sabido and other members of the group, formed out of the Ambition Lawrence Weston (ALW) community organisation, are no strangers to tackling difficult challenges. Last year ALW completed a project to build a 150m wind turbine – as tall as Blackpool Tower – that feeds the National Grid and generates income for Lawrence Weston. But what will it take to bring a smashed-up estate pub back from the dead?
Vanishing act
“There was a tidy pub down the road called the Mason’s Arms – well worth visiting, a nice skittle alley,” Sabido smiles, across a table in ALW’s home on Long Cross, Lawrence Weston’s main drag. “There was the Long Cross Inn, the Penpole, the Giant Goram, and the The Rose of England – which was the first to go.”
His tale of disappearing pubs will sound familiar to many. Despite Bristol’s famous nightlife, here as elsewhere many neighbourhoods have seen decades- or centuries-old social spaces vanish rapidly. Usually, they are replaced by flats.
Some inner-city areas have been especially hard-hit. Both St Paul’s and Barton Hill have essentially become pub-free zones over the past couple of decades.
But outlying estates have also suffered badly. Lockleaze’s last pub, the Golden Bottle, was bulldozed in 2020.
Hartcliffe – home to more than 10,000 people – is down to just one. Back in Lawrence Weston, residents thirsting for a pint must walk about a mile to the Hope and Anchor in Shirehampton, or further to the Blaise Inn at Henbury.
“It means we lose our sense of identity,” says Sabido. “People go elsewhere to find their community.”
The Giant Goram closed after being bought by Hawkfield Homes, which applied to demolish the pub and build seven homes. But the council – whose policies seek to prevent the loss of pubs unless they are proved to be unviable, or there are ‘diverse’ others nearby – refused.
So did government planning inspectors in 2021, after Hawkfield appealed. Again, they found the pub’s unviability not proven, and expressed concern about the “effect of the proposed demolition on the character and appearance of the area”.
Next, explains Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) representative Chris Faulkner Gibson, who provided evidence to the planning appeal, “an application popped out of the woodwork from a Buddhist organisation who wanted to turn it into a meditation centre”.
“That fizzled out,” Faulkner Gibson continues. “But Hawkfield Homes came back with [the current] application – virtually identical to the first, but now they’ve included a micropub.” Both CAMRA and the campaign group argue that the micropub, which would seat fewer than 20 people indoors, would not meet community needs.
More than a pub
So what would serve those needs – and provide a way back for the Giant Goram? The model campigners have been exploring is one championed by the Plunkett Foundation, a charity that backs community businesses – including pubs, which it has supported to become more viable by offering a range of other services. In recent years it has helped more than 60 pubs into community ownership.
Many of these have been in rural areas. But a famous early adopter of this way of doing things was the Bevy – aka Bevendean – in Brighton. Like the Giant Goram, this was an estate pub that had closed, in an area where few people have much money, and was on its way to rack and ruin.
But a group of residents persuaded a local community interest company, East Brighton Trust (EBT), to buy the building at a knock-down price. EBT turned the upstairs into housing while tendering the ground floor for community use – with the residents’ group selling shares to locals and then bidding for funds, and ultimately raising hundreds of thousands of pounds for refurbishments. The Bevy reopened in 2014, cooperatively run and promising to be ‘more than a pub’.
“What are our unique selling points? We do a seniors club every Friday for five quid, family Thursdays with free activities for children, and then every single person in the pub gets to eat for free,” says Warren Carter, chair of the Bevy. “We do a monthly disability disco, we do our Brains at the Bevy – which is academic talks once a month – so we look at things that are a little bit different, that bring different people into the pub.”
Keeping afloat is tough, Carter admits, with the Bevy struggling to cope with soaring utility costs. “It’s a fucking ballache at times – 80% of the time it’s brilliant, 10% of the time it’s hell,” he says.
But Carter says there are always lots of income streams to tap – especially for pubs that act more like community organisations – and just as importantly locals keen to be part of keeping things moving. “There must be 50 people a week,” he goes on, who chip in with practical help for the pub. These range from builders who drink there and fix things for free, to cooks who come in to volunteer at kids’ clubs.
Carter puts a lot of these deep community ties down to time spent talking to people, back when the Bevy was still closed. “We did lots of door-knocking, especially to neighbours who wanted the pub closed because it was so bad at the end, and asked what they wanted – loads of which we could deliver,” he says.
Hard road ahead
In Lawrence Weston, Sabido reckons ALW has spoken to several hundred people so far. He has no shortage of ideas for the Giant Goram’s future – cafe, after-school club, community garden. But he admits – as the Cable’s own door-knocking suggests – more conversations are needed to get people onside.
In the meantime, many hurdles remain – the first of which is this week’s planning decision. If approval is given for redevelopment, it is game over for the pub.
It’s expected councillors will refuse, on similar grounds to last time. But officers have not gone so far as to formally recommend they do so, with developer Hawkfield having made some tweaks to its plans that make the micropub more viable.
If the refusal goes ahead, the campaign group will have a way forward to completing a business plan for the Giant Goram, which the Plunkett Foundation has been helping develop over several years. This depends on the community group bidding for grants to pay for things like assessing refurbishment costs and developing initial designs – all of which have effectively been blocked by the live planning application.
Then there is the question of whether Hawkfield – which has so far refused to engage with the campaign group around selling the Giant Goram – will play ball. The company, which paid £331,000 for the pub in 2019, faces a significant loss on that investment. At least one other local pub operator is understood to have made enquiries, complicating the picture.
Sabido remains optimistic, despite the hard road ahead, with other pubs that have made it through similar journeys expressing public support for the campaign to save the Giant Goram. “You can see how the community has piled in and helped with their refurbishment,” he says of one of those, the White Horse in Stonesfield, Oxfordshire. “We want the same thing.”
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