With the Francis family having bought the freehold to The New Inn back in the 1970’s and subsequently let it out to Dorset-based brewery, Hall & Woodhouse, for the last 25 years it was evident that decision about it’s future was looming.
Let’s roll back the clock 2 or 3 years and set the scene – Hall & Woodhouse had been sitting tenants at The New Inn for 20-odd years and their period of occupation was coming to a close in the not too distant future (approx early 2023). As a family unit we were faced with a fairly serious decision to make.
Do we take it back and run it ourselves or do we sell it?
We chose the most exciting option open to us – we chose to disregard selling altogether and finally take the building and the keys back and run the New Inn as a true family run business. Could we do it? What did we need to do to make this fairytale ending happen? What would happen to The Hogget in Hook (our previous pub…)? Who would work for us? Could we do it? What kind of business could we create there?
Clearly this conundrum needed much, much further discussion; plus a bit of number crunching as well as multiple glasses of wine.
After the aforementioned glasses of wine we decided (collectively) that we would not sell The New Inn; it simply meant too much to the Francis family so we decided to take back the keys from H&W at the end of their lease and run it ourselves and JUST DO IT! We knew that it would be a massive challenge but with many, many years experience running food-driven destination pub venues we felt confident that we could put The New Inn back on the map.
To cut a long story short, we got the keys back to the New Inn on the 22nd of September 2022 and began the restoration and refurbishment of all aspects of building straight away.
Watch this space…
So what now? What do we do first?
Let’s pour another glass of wine and talk about it…
