Major bar chain with 4,500 sites to shutter city centre pub in weeks
A MAJOR bar chain with 4,500 sites will shutter one of its city centre pubs in just weeks.
Stonegate has confirmed it will close The Bedford in Southampton city centre come January.
The pub was a popular location for local students in the area and showed sport matches such as football and rugby.
The Grade II listed building has been operating as a pub since the 1800s.
Locals have flocked to social media to share their devastation about the closure.
One said: “What?! That’s surprising, and a damn shame. This is my regular haunt for 6 nations and other rugby games.
“So It’ll be a block of flats and I’ll need to find a new rugby pub, It’s like the Avondale all over again. I’m glad the staff are going to be ok though.”
While another said it was “the end of an era”.
A third commented: “I hope the building stays. The planners and architects seem to like destroying Southampton’s history!!”
A fourth posted: “Such a shame. I didn’t go there that often, but fond memories of it nonetheless.”
And a fifth wrote: “Memories of a few good nights here as a lad, but everything in life evolves.”
Stonegate does not own the building and is returning it to the landlord in January.
It could potentially be re-let to another pub operator or sold.
The building is listed on the Savills property website for in excess of £500,000.
But Stonegate, which owns a number of bar chains from Popworld to Slug and Lettuce, said it will relocate staff to nearby Stonegate sites.
It will be another blow for local residents of the area who have seen a number of hospitality and retail businesses exit in recent months.
Earlier this year Jack Willis exited the West Quay shopping centre located in the city.
As for Stonegate, the giant raised fears about its survival earlier this year as it looked to plug its debts.
However, it secured a refinancing package over the summer to help it tackle the pile.
Stonegate is owned by TDR Capital, which also partly owns Asda, and is registered offshore in the Cayman Islands.
Last year the company refinanced 1,000 of its pubs with the debt firm Apollo to inject some fresh cash into the business.
WHAT IS HAPPENING TO HOSPITALITY?
Many food and drink chains have been struggling recently as the cost of living has led to fewer people spending on eating out.
Businesses had been struggling to bounce back after the pandemic, only to be hit with soaring energy bills and inflation.
Multiple chains have been affected, resulting in big-name brands like Wetherspoons and Frankie & Benny’s closing branches.
Some chains have not survived, Byron Burger fell into administration last year, with owners saying it would result in the loss of over 200 jobs.
Pizza giant, Papa Johns announced it would be shutting down 43 of its stores this year.
Tasty, the owner of Wildwood, also shut sites as part of major restructuring plans.
Why are retailers closing shops?
EMPTY shops have become an eyesore on many British high streets and are often symbolic of a town centre’s decline.
The Sun’s business editor Ashley Armstrong explains why so many retailers are shutting their doors.
In many cases, retailers are shutting stores because they are no longer the money-makers they once were because of the rise of online shopping.
Falling store sales and rising staff costs have made it even more expensive for shops to stay open. In some cases, retailers are shutting a store and reopening a new shop at the other end of a high street to reflect how a town has changed.
The problem is that when a big shop closes, footfall falls across the local high street, which puts more shops at risk of closing.
Retail parks are increasingly popular with shoppers, who want to be able to get easy, free parking at a time when local councils have hiked parking charges in towns.
Many retailers including Next and Marks & Spencer have been shutting stores on the high street and taking bigger stores in better-performing retail parks instead.
Boss Stuart Machin recently said that when it relocated a tired store in Chesterfield to a new big store in a retail park half a mile away, its sales in the area rose by 103 per cent.
In some cases, stores have been shut when a retailer goes bust, as in the case of Wilko, Debenhams Topshop, Dorothy Perkins and Paperchase to name a few.
What’s increasingly common is when a chain goes bust a rival retailer or private equity firm snaps up the intellectual property rights so they can own the brand and sell it online.
They may go on to open a handful of stores if there is customer demand, but there are rarely ever as many stores or in the same places.