A plague of developers - how one pub fought back

[Tony Gosling]

The death and life of the great British pub

Across the country, pubs are being shuttered at 
an alarming rate – scooped up by developers and 
ransacked for profit – changing the face of 
neighbourhoods and turning our beloved locals 
into estate agents, betting shops, and luxury 
flats. This is the story of how one pub fought back

<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://www.theguardian.com/profile/tomlamont>Tom 
Lamont -   Tuesday 13 October 2015 06.00 BSTLast 
modified on Tuesday 13 October 201516.01 BST
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/the-death-and-life-of-a-great-british-pub

The Murphy family, John, Mary and their adult son 
Dave, were preparing to spend a 33rd Christmas as 
landlords of the Golden Lion pub in Camden, north 
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://www.theguardian.com/uk/london>London 
when they heard the rumours. A mysterious figure 
was said to be looming in their corner of the 
industry, harrying publicans, striking down 
premises. There was “a Grim Reaper of pubs”, the 
Murphys were told, and he was circling their 
handsome Victorian building on Royal College Street.

It was December 2011. In front of the pub’s 
eyelash-shaped bar, beneath a blackboard that, 
for as long as anyone could remember, had 
advertised a heavy discount on tumblers of Irish 
Mist, the family met with a representative of 
Admiral Taverns. Admiral was the large pub-owning 
company – a pubco, as they are known in the trade 
– that leased the Murphy family their tenancy at 
the Golden Lion. “The rep told us she had bad 
news,” said Dave Murphy, a solid, red-cheeked man in his 40s.

Dave Murphy was 11 in 1978, the year his parents 
signed their first lease at the Golden Lion, and 
moved the family in to rooms on the building’s 
upper storeys. Their previous home, in Holloway, 
had backed on to a prison. Now Dave got to tell 
school friends he lived in a pub. Before remaking 
himself as a landlord, John Murphy, originally 
from Cork, had worked for years in London as a 
bus driver. Mary, from Galway, had been a nurse. 
“You’re nursing the sick. And suddenly you’re 
nursing the drinkers,” Mary recalled, of the 
transition. “I don’t think I found it too difficult.”

In the 1970s the Golden Lion was owned by 
Charrington: delicate tiling spelled out the name 
of the British brewery in magnificent celebration 
on the bar-back. In the 1990s, Charrington was 
absorbed by Punch Taverns, one of the muscular 
pubcos that were then coming to dominate the 
industry. When Punch sold on a batch of the pubs 
it had inherited from Charrington to Admiral 
Taverns in the 2000s, the Golden Lion changed 
hands once more. Dave Murphy said the family 
usually found out about these events informally, 
over cups of tea, whenever a rep from whichever 
company then owned them stopped by. “They had a 
habit of telling you everything afterwards,” he said.
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/the-death-and-life-of-a-great-british-pub#img-2>
Dave Murphy, the landlord of the Golden Lion in Camden, north L
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/the-death-and-life-of-a-great-british-pub#img-2>
  Dave Murphy, the landlord of the Golden Lion in 
Camden, north London. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

The family had learned to be bullish about the 
passing of their pub from one lofty brand to 
another. It never much affected their lives at 
drip-tray height. In the eyes of their regular 
customers, the Murphys were the Golden Lion. 
Their hands were on the taps of Guinness and 
Guinness Extra Cold, they signed the orders on 
boxes of Tayto crisps. The Murphys brushed down 
the pool table before evening league matches and 
heard the grumbles of anyone who had lost a pound 
or more in the flashing Dream Machine. They had 
hosted parties for weddings, christenings, 
communions. One regular, his photograph kept 
afterwards on a shelf above the till, had been 
served a last pint by Mary Murphy before dying on 
the pavement outside; his wake took place back indoors.

The Golden Lion is a local landmark, a towering 
red-brick building with a double-peaked roof and 
a high, pronged chimney. Seen from a distance 
along Royal College Street, the building looks a 
little like one of those Chinese cat dolls that 
wave. Closer, the exterior reveals fancy 
adornment, carved stone, colourful glazed 
ceramics, Dutch gables – showy work done when the 
Golden Lion was pulled down and rebuilt at the 
end of the 19th century. Its owner back then was 
a Victorian businessman named Will Hetherington. 
He put an advertisement in the parish newspaper 
at the time to boast of his expensive 
refurbishment, inviting locals to make use of the 
Lion’s “comfort and convenience”. In a century of 
successive ownership, the Golden Lion remained 
always a locals’ pub, used for the most part by 
those who lived and worked within a few hundred metres of the front door.
[]

Under the Murphys’ stewardship, carpets, 
curtains, and horsey wallpaper were removed over 
time, leaving a clean, pale-walled interior with 
bare wooden floors. The family brought in a 
jukebox, a dartboard, later a pair of flatscreen 
TVs, mounted at either end of the saloon and kept 
tuned, as a rule, to sport, quiz shows, or (on 
weekend evenings) talent contests. Benches 
outside were taken up, even in winter, by 
smokers. In the men’s loo a passing Arsenal fan 
had felt-tipped a crude club badge above the sink 
and Dave Murphy, an Arsenal fan himself, had not 
yet ordered it to be washed away. John Murphy, 
after decades in charge, had retired for health 
reasons, and Dave was now responsible for the 
Golden Lion’s overall management. Though he no 
longer lived above the pub, Mary did. She still 
served behind the bar every afternoon and evening.

During their meeting with the Admiral rep, the 
family were told the Golden Lion had been sold on 
once more. Not to another pubco, but to a private 
individual. Dave Murphy remembered the Admiral 
rep being sympathetic and, speaking candidly, she 
told them that the man who now owned the Golden 
Lion “was notorious for shutting pubs down”. 
After the meeting, Dave Murphy rang around some 
friends in the business. He read out the name 
he’d scribbled on a piece of paper: Antony Stark.

Had anyone heard of him?

“I was told, this was it,” Murphy remembered. 
“The Grim Reaper. That if he knocked on the door 
of your pub, well 
 it meant the end.”


2. A plague of developers

Counting the closures of rural inns, high-street 
noise boxes, sticky-carpet boozers of the 
backstreets, it can be said that roughly 30 pubs 
shut every week in the UK; a rate of decline 
that, as one group of worried analysts has 
calculated, would mean total elimination of the British pub by the 2040s.

The massive number of pubs in Britain, something 
between 50,000 and 60,000, is credited by some to 
the Black Death. Plague-struck, the 14th-century 
Britons who had not been annihilated were left in 
an emptier land, earning higher wages, perhaps 
better inclined to enjoy themselves. They spent 
more time and money than ever before in 
purpose-built taverns or private residences that 
would sell them drink. Some 700 years later, the 
pubs themselves have contracted a form of plague. 
Call it the Black Development.

Closures began on a pandemic scale around the 
time of the 2008 financial crash, when spending 
in pubs dropped with the recession. Landlords’ 
profits fell. Meanwhile many of the pubcos, which 
had undergone rapid expansion during the 90s and 
2000s, found themselves over indebted. As the 
property market collapsed, they were urged by 
creditors to offload assets, and this meant 
selling on pubs – often in great anonymous 
batches. Though British pubcos tend to assume 
names suggestive of either boozy bonhomie (Punch 
Taverns, Faucet Inns) or basic vigour and drive 
(Enterprise Inns, Admiral Taverns) they are as a 
rule cheerless, lumbering concerns. Landlords 
whose pubs were traded by the pubcos after the 
crash were not often consulted, or even told in 
advance. The Murphys’ experience – of hearing 
about a major change in their professional lives 
from a visiting rep, and in the form of an “Oh, by the way 
” – was common.

Some of the thousands of pubs that were sold on 
after 2008 went on to reopen under new ownership. 
Some even reopened as pubs, but the majority were 
remade as restaurants, cafes, minimarkets, 
community centres, flats (lots of flats), betting 
shops, loan shops, estate agents. The Beech Tree 
in Blackburn was converted into the headquarters 
of a religious charity. The Three Pigeons in 
Oswestry was bought by a local football team, for 
use as its clubhouse. The Campaign For Real Ale 
(Camra) estimated in 2008 that a third of all 
shuttered pubs were converted into secondary 
businesses. Another third became residential 
properties. The final third were demolished. The 
Turners Arms in Rotherham, in fact, became the office of a demolition firm.
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/the-death-and-life-of-a-great-british-pub#img-3>
Regulars at the Golden Lion.
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/the-death-and-life-of-a-great-british-pub#img-3>
  Regulars at the Golden Lion. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

In 2010, an estate agent who helped broker the 
sale of the Beech Tree and the Turners Arms, 
Gavin Sherman, told the property magazine 
Property Drum that perhaps as few as 10% of 
sold-on pubs remained pubs. “Ninety per cent of 
what we sell is set for alternative use,” said 
Sherman, who then worked at a property agency 
called Paramount Properties, based in north-west 
London. Sherman brokered the sale of many of 
Admiral Taverns’ pubs. He explained some of the 
quirks of British planning law, loopholes that 
allowed sold-on pubs to be converted for other 
use without the approval of communities or local 
councils. “Planning permission is generally not 
required to convert a pub to retail or restaurant 
use,” Sherman said. But he warned that efforts to 
transform a pub into a house or a flat would 
incur greater difficulties: “Conversion to residential use is often fraught.”

It did not take long for Britain’s property 
developers to realise that a pub’s ample 
real-estate footprint could be turned for most 
profit should the building be chopped up and sold 
on in pieces: an assortment of individual flats 
was best. And rather in the manner that an 
ancient general might have kept a flattering 
portrait of his defeated rival, developers 
successful in their bids to convert in this way 
often kept the name of the lost pub for their new 
apartment blocks. Sometimes they even retained swinging signage outside.

The Golden Lion, as it stood in 2011, had four 
storeys and a cellar that were each around 92 
square metres (1,000 square feet). An ambitious 
developer would have looked up at the building 
from Royal College Street and seen a five-layer 
sandwich of space. As a pub, it had a market 
value of between £650,000 and £700,000. Closed 
and emptied of customers, staff, beer barrels and 
Dream Machines, however, there would be room for 
seven or eight flats inside. A small studio 
apartment could be expected to sell in Camden for 
£250,000, a larger two-bedroom flat for twice 
that. “Do the maths,” Dave Murphy told his family, when he learned this.

Quietly, Murphy had hopes of buying the Golden 
Lion himself. The Murphys’ early years on Royal 
College Street had been very profitable, so much 
so that in the 1980s they took over the lease of 
a second premises, the Duke’s Head in Highgate, a 
few miles to the north. Over the years, Dave 
Murphy had built up other business interests 
outside the hospitality industry, and had been 
able to buy the Duke’s Head from the pubco that 
owned it. He had even done some development, 
converting upstairs rooms at the Duke’s Head into 
self-contained flats. By spring 2011, Murphy felt 
he had the funds to make a bid for the Golden 
Lion. He emailed Admiral, expressing interest, but did not hear back.

Though pubcos tend to assume names suggestive of 
mug-rolling bonhomie (Punch Taverns) they are cheerless concerns

In December, the pub was sold to Antony Stark. He 
paid £525,000 for the head lease and £160,000 for 
the freehold, £690,000 in total. According to a 
document later submitted to Camden council’s 
planning department, the agent who brokered the 
sale was Gavin Sherman. Sherman said the sale to 
Stark came about after a long period during which 
the Golden Lion was placed on the market but drew 
precious few offers. Sherman described a general 
“lack of interest” from buyers who might want to 
continue to operate the pub as a pub, hence its 
sale to Stark, maybe for “alternative uses”. 
Sherman said he had been responsible for the 
marketing of the pub’s sale, and that 
advertisements had been placed online and in 
print publications announcing its availability 
for “at least a six-month period”.

This was odd. The pub industry is intimate and 
gossip sodden – “everybody talks,” said Mary 
Murphy, a small, soft-spoken woman in her 70s 
with a brilliant coronet of red hair. If her pub 
had been up for sale for half a year, she would 
have expected to hear about it. Likely from the 
landlord of the Sovereign, or of the World’s End, 
or of the Dublin Castle, or of the Sheephaven – 
all of these men regular customers at the Golden 
Lion. “I’d question the advertising to tell the 
truth,” Dave Murphy told me. “Was it 
half-heartedly marketed? Or was it not marketed 
at all? No one ever contacted us. Nothing was 
ever put through our door. We never saw anything 
in the 
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://www.morningadvertiser.co.uk/>Morning 
Advertiser.”

I spoke to Kevin Georgel, the CEO of Admiral 
Taverns, recently, and he told me that, as far as 
he could discern, the Golden Lion was not 
advertised for sale at all in 2011. “Sometimes 
pubs are sold without marketing because we get an 
unsolicited offer that we believe is compelling 
enough to accept,” said Georgel, who only became 
the pubco’s CEO last year. “It’s my understanding 
the Golden Lion wasn’t marketed, and therefore it 
was sold by Admiral off the back of an 
unsolicited offer.” Sherman disputed this, 
telling me that he marketed the pub for sale 
“discreetly”, and under Admiral’s instruction. 
Admiral denied this. Whatever the circumstances 
of the Golden Lion’s sale in December 2011, the 
Murphy family were appalled by it; and their 
unhappiness only deepened in the days afterwards, 
when Sherman arrived one afternoon in the pub’s 
saloon. It was the first time the landlords and the estate agent had met.

Sherman, a Londoner in his late 30s, had a narrow 
face and close-cropped hair. He brought with him 
in to the pub a second man, also in his late 30s, 
handsome and with a rugby player’s build. The 
second man introduced himself as David. The two 
men asked to inspect the pub. “They looked 
around, looked in the cellar,” recalled Dave 
Murphy, who followed them downstairs to the cold 
room. In among the refrigerated beer barrels he 
strained to hear, under the hum of a cooling 
unit, what the two men were discussing. “They 
seemed to me to be working out: what can we do here?”

Back upstairs at the bar, Murphy asked the men to 
be straight with him. Was the Golden Lion going 
to be closed? Murphy remembered being advised by 
the man who called himself David not to worry. 
“If you play ball with Antony Stark,” the man 
said, “he’ll be fair with you.” Only later did it 
occur to Murphy that the man he was speaking to 
was Stark himself. “I looked it up on the 
internet, 
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://www.kinsmanhousing.co.uk/our-people/4580335236>saw 
a picture on his website. Oh, it was definitely 
him,” said Murphy. “I’m the hospitality trade. Good with faces.”

Twelve weeks later, in March 2012, a submission 
was made to Camden council’s planning department. 
Stark, through his intermediaries, wanted 
permission to turn the Golden Lion into flats. 
The building would be gutted. Across its four 
floors and in the basement, studios and 
multi-room apartments would be built, eight in 
total. “The image of the Golden Lion [on] the 
building’s facade could be retained,” it was suggested. There would be no pub.


3.How to disappear a pub

1) Identify a site. Not far from the Golden Lion, 
on Plender Street, there was a pub called the 
Parr’s Head. It had a history of ownership very 
much like the Golden Lion’s: Charrington to Punch 
to Admiral. In May 2011, Admiral Taverns sold the 
pub to a private individual, Antony Stark.

2) Buy it. As Stark did, paying roughly £500,000.

3) You will by now have set up a limited company 
with a benign, impersonal name – an obliging 
layer of distance between developer and 
development while the pub is managed through its 
final months. In the case of the Parr’s Head the 
company was called Essien Properties Ltd, incorporated by Stark in 2010.

4) Hire a planning consultant to fill in forms, 
sketch out proposals, and write the sort of 
hustling and entitled cover letters that council 
planning departments receive every day. In May 
2011, a consultant named David Kemp from DK 
Planning, under instruction from Stark, sent the 
first part of a planning application to Camden council. Six new flats, please.

5) Shutter. One evening in October 2011, a 
goodbye party was held at the Parr’s Head. The 
grandson of the pub’s longest-serving landlord, 
John Carnaby, who ran it from the 1930s to the 
1970s, attended. Stories were told – about Empire 
day parties and egg-and-spoon races off the front 
step, the performing elephant from a nearby music 
hall who in the 1950s made regular stops at the 
pub to be fed biscuits. There were tears. Then 
the 150-year-old pub closed for good.
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/the-death-and-life-of-a-great-british-pub#img-4>
Karaoke night at the Golden Lion.
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/the-death-and-life-of-a-great-british-pub#img-4>
  Karaoke night at the Golden Lion. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

6) Wait for objections from locals. One formal 
complaint was made about the closure of the 
Parr’s Head, a neighbour pointing out that it 
seemed a shame in an area that was undergoing so 
much change. The letter was level-headed, 
accurate, and, by itself, completely 
disregardable. Cuts have diminished council 
planning departments to the point that, 
sometimes, only controversial or fiercely 
contended applications are truly scrutinised. 
Plans for the conversion of the Parr’s Head were 
approved by Camden in November 2011.

7) Consider reselling. With planning permission 
locked in, the value of the property will have 
risen. Sixteen days after the Parr’s Head 
conversion was approved, the pub was sold on by 
Antony Stark to another private developer. Stark 
received more than twice what he had paid for the building, six months earlier.

8) Build! Scaffolding went up around the Parr’s 
Head in early 2012, its doors doubly barred by 
chipboard and a four-metre-high perimeter fence. 
Trespassers were warned of prosecution. By 2013, 
the Parr’s Head, painted cruise-ship white and 
with its address stencilled in easily-read font 
above the door, was ready to return to the market as six flats.

9) Sell. In deals brokered by the estate agency 
McHugh & Co, flat three at the Parr’s Head went 
for £279,950, flat four for £349,950, flat two 
for £460,000, flat six for £575,000, and flat 
five for £630,000. In April 2014, 
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/https://twitter.com/McHughCo/status/453925121930297345>the 
estate agency tweeted that the final and most 
expensive flat, flat one, had “#Sold”. It went for £675,000.

10) Do the maths. As a pub, the Parr’s Head was 
worth roughly £500,000. With approval for it to 
be de-pubbed, the building was sold on for £1.3m. 
As six separate flats, it ended up going for a total just shy of £3m.


4.A visit from the bailiffs

Dave Murphy sought to learn what he could about 
his pub’s new owner. Searching on the 
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/companies-house>Companies 
House website, he learned that Antony Stark had 
established a limited company ahead of the 
purchase of the Golden Lion – this one called 
Norreys Barn Ltd and Stark its only director and 
shareholder. There were several other such 
limited companies, owned and operated by Stark, 
that appeared to have been set up to buy and 
oversee pubs around the country. At that point, 
Murphy said: “I realised we were just another project..

The family’s lease at the pub was to run out in 
August 2012. It had been renewed without 
difficulty every decade since the 1970s; Stark 
now resolved that it would end. The family would 
not necessarily be turned out the moment their 
tenancy ended – there were provisions in place 
under the Landlord and Tenants Act to stop that 
happening, and incumbents who did not want to 
leave could pursue a case in court, a bit of 
hand-forcing that was known in the trade as 
“holding over”. Still, their position would be 
more difficult after August. And every day it got more difficult still.

Early in 2012 the family received an invoice in 
the post for their building insurance. This was a 
cost traditionally passed down by a pub’s owner 
to be covered by the landlord. “It had nearly 
doubled overnight,” said Dave Murphy. (Antony 
Stark said the cost was arranged on the best 
available market terms.) When Murphy declined to 
pay – while he questioned the new figure with 
Stark’s representatives – bailiffs arrived at the 
pub. “They were told to take everything,” said 
Murphy, who kept the requisition list. “The 
piano, the pool table. Every table, every chair, 
every glass.” Nothing like this had ever happened 
under Charrington, or Punch, or Admiral. “At this 
point we’d been under new ownership for a matter 
of weeks.” Murphy paid the new building 
insurance. And he paid the cost of the bailiffs’ visit, too.

The family was charged more for beer. An 
11-gallon keg of Carling lager might cost a 
landlord, on the open market, £85. Most landlords 
are unable to shop on the open market, however. 
It is one of the perverse conditions of the 
business – the majority of them are “tied”, in 
other words obliged to buy beer through the 
unchecked middlemanship of whoever owns them. 
When the Golden Lion was under the ownership of 
Admiral Taverns, the Murphys were charged £145 
for every £85 keg of Carling they bought.
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/the-death-and-life-of-a-great-british-pub#img-5>
The Golden Lion is a venue for local pool league matches.
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/the-death-and-life-of-a-great-british-pub#img-5>
  The Golden Lion is a venue for pool league 
matches in the evenings. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

The beer tie was known in the trade as “wet 
rent”, a measure first intended to keep 
landlords’ actual rent low – the theory being 
that the overall cost of their tenancy would be 
tagged to the amount of drink they sold. In 
practice, as I was told by more than one 
industry-watcher, the beer tie had long been a 
way for pubcos to tease up profits; and after the 
2008 crash, pubcos really started working the 
dial in their favour, charging sums for beer that 
were way above the rate of inflation. The 
situation for landlords rarely improved if their 
pub passed from a pubco to a private owner. 
Particularly if that owner had plans to make a 
bid with local authorities for conversion; 
because such a bid was almost certain to depend 
on the pub being provably under-loved and 
under-patronised, unprofitable, unviable. After 
Antony Stark bought the Golden Lion in 2011, the 
cost of every £85 keg of Carling the Murphys bought went up to £152.

It is sometimes the case that a pub will 
disappear and passersby will remark: Well at 
least it wasn’t one of the good pubs. It was 
falling apart, the landlord always had a face on, 
the beer was too expensive. But a well-plotted 
redevelopment does not always begin with 
filled-in forms, or with cover letters to the 
council. In November 2012, a package was 
delivered to the Murphys at the pub. It contained a thick, shiny ringbinder.

“We act for your landlord Norreys Barn Ltd,” read 
a cover letter from the 
solicitor<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://www.kimbellsfreeth.co.uk/>Kimbells 
Freeth. “We enclose by way of service upon you an 
interim schedule of dilapidation and wants of 
repair [...] Kindly note the failure to address 
the disrepairs itemised in the enclosed schedule 
[...] may result in the issue and service of 
proceedings.” The ringbinder contained a long 
list of compulsory building work the Murphys must undertake.

They did not dispute that the upkeep of the pub 
was their responsibility. Dave Murphy agreed 
that, in many ways, the Lion was “dated”. He 
wondered, though, whether all of the requests 
were necessary. (The 34-point improvement plan 
included a demand to “make good all stucco and 
quoins”.) In total, the repairs would cost the 
family between £40,000 and £50,000. This sum of 
money, it was pointed out in a letter written to 
the council by Stark’s own planning team, “would 
completely wipe [the Murphy’s] profit out and 
place the business deep into debt”.

As Dave Murphy leafed through the pages of 
repairs he noticed that he owed an extra £2,000, 
too, for the work that went into compiling the shiny ring binder.


5.Into battle

Dale Ingram once let a pub die on her watch and never forgot it.

“Beautiful polished sapele panelling. 
Brecon-tiled fireplaces with timber overmantels. 
A lovely bar counter with decorative bar-back – 
oh, it was gorgeous!” That pub, in Wandsworth, 
south London, was called the Little House. In 
2010, the Little House was bought by a property 
development firm and an application to convert it 
was filed with the local council. Ingram lived 
nearby at the time. A blonde and bronze-skinned 
woman in her early 50s, often to be found in 
bright clothes and smoking or at least thinking 
about smoking a cigarette, she had worked in 
telecommunications for years before retraining to 
be a conservationist. Fearful of what might 
become of the Little House’s 1930s interior under 
its new ownership, she tried to get the pub listed by English Heritage.
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/the-death-and-life-of-a-great-british-pub#img-6>
Dale Ingram, an expert at saving pubs.
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/the-death-and-life-of-a-great-british-pub#img-6>
  Dale Ingram, an expert at saving pubs 
Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

“It was my first campaign,” recalled Ingram, who 
by then had decided to make the protection of 
endangered pubs her particular interest as a 
conservationist. “I was green in judgment.”

If English Heritage – a charity with the power to 
grant legal protections to buildings it deems 
special – could not insist that the Little House 
continued to be used as a pub, it could at least 
stop major alterations. Ingram wrote to English 
Heritage’s officers acclaiming the pub (those 
tiled fireplaces, the timber overmantels!), and 
in doing so accidentally accelerated its end. 
English Heritage wrote to the Little House’s new 
owners, a property development firm called 
Languard Investments, asking for permission to 
visit and assess the interior. Languard, at least 
as Ingram told the story, promptly “brought along 
skips”. Languard declined to comment.

Today, the Little House is a block of flats. “To 
take a pick axe to something so beautiful,” said 
Ingram, “I hated those developers for doing that.”

When Languard went on to pursue the conversion of 
another south London pub, buying up one called 
the Castle on Battersea High Street, Ingram again 
sought to oppose it. The Castle was unlovely, she 
recalled, “a 1960s brick shed”. But when Languard 
announced a plan to knock the pub down, locals 
were appalled. Ugly or not, they made good use of 
the Castle – and this is where, Ingram said, the 
notion of a pub’s value must be divided. “What is 
its architectural merit? And what is its social 
value?” The Castle was ugly, but it was loved; 
and when nearby residents were 
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://www.yourlocalguardian.co.uk/news/local/wandsworthnews/9610920.Battersea_pub_owners_shut_down_local_in__revenge__for_campaign/>canvassed 
for their support, around 1,000 wrote to 
Wandsworth council to oppose the demolition.

The Castle was knocked down anyway. Neighbours 
captured the scene with their phones as the pub 
was hammered at by demolition workers in high-vis 
jackets, then dragged apart by a digger. Ingram’s 
campaign was not wasted, however. In the face of 
around 1,000 written complaints, the building’s 
owners had been obliged to agree a new condition 
– that the ground floor of whatever they put up 
in place of the Castle must remain a pub.

If Ingram’s involvement in the Little House was 
amateurish, in the Castle it was emotional. (“I 
said to myself, ‘They’re not getting two!’”) 
Since then her work on behalf of pubs has been 
professional, paid, more dispassionate. She has 
had wins, probably more losses. The Fellowship 
Inn in Bellingham, south-east London, was saved, 
as were three neighbouring pubs in west London, 
targeted for closure and development in 2012, all 
three kept open and unaltered. The fates of the 
Rutland Arms in Baslow, Derbyshire and the 
Porcupine in Mottingham, south-east London remain 
undecided after long campaigns. Ingram also 
worked to protect the Prince of Wales in Tooting, 
south London, which is now a Tesco. Often, she 
said, it was too late by the time she received a 
call. Asked if there were ever cases in which she 
thought a pub should be allowed to close, she replied: “Absolutely.”

The Victorians who threw up such numbers of pubs 
that survive into the 21st century knew nothing 
of supermarket cider or the ability to purchase 
two-dozen Skol for a tenner at Bargain Booze. 
They did not have 60 episodes of QI or many 
evenings’ worth of Fast & Furious movies on 
Netflix. The phrase “a healthy lifestyle” has 
come to be understood by society, if not as a 
rule, then at least a decent ambition. And 
Britain has become home to religious communities 
that discourage, if not actively forbid, alcohol. 
The country does not depend on pubs as it did. 
Arguably, we do not need so many. Even Dave 
Murphy, scrabbling to save the Golden Lion, could 
see that. “When we moved here in the 70s, I don’t 
know ... the pub trade was different. Every night was a party night.”

“It happens. It does happen,” Murphy continued. 
“Pubs see out their time.” He could not accept, 
however, that his own pub had reached its end. “I 
admit it, myself,” he said. “We weren’t ever 
making, sort of, millions. We weren’t always 
making a lot of money, honestly. But the business 
wasn’t in trouble. We were making a living.”

Early one Saturday evening – threatening a party 
night – Murphy came in through the doors of the 
Golden Lion just as the whirring of the jukebox 
was giving way to the hi-hat of a Patti LaBelle 
track. About two dozen customers were in, most 
gathered in a group around two pushed-together 
tables. At the bar, a woman in a fur coat ordered 
her lager in a “mummy glass” – half. When it was 
decided by the group around the table they wanted 
to toast the emerging evening with Jägermeisters, 
they were handed eight stubby glasses and the 
bottle, and told to sort it themselves. On the 
TVs, a match ended and was switched for an 
episode of The Voice. The landlord of the 
Sovereign came in and took up his customary seat 
across the room from the dartboard. Mary, 
resplendent in a shiny crepe shirt, came down from upstairs.

More customers arrived, including a trio of young 
white men under fiercely clipped wedges of hair; 
a smart Asian couple, congratulated several times 
on an engagement; a dad in a bomber jacket, 
carrying his seven-year-old daughter; a cyclist 
who parked his bike underneath the dartboard. 
Soon, the woman in furs was showing the 
seven-year-old how to apply eyeliner. When chat 
in the saloon turned to a regular customer who 
had died, the little girl asked a question and 
was told: “People do, darling, it’s the only 
thing guaranteed.” Emeli Sandé succeeded Patti 
LaBelle, then Elvis played. A suntanned pair in 
their 60s arrived and ordered two individual JP 
Chenets from the wine shelf. Someone asked: “You 
here for the duration?” The Golden Lion, then, 
did not seem a pub that would be ready to close 
its doors at midnight, let alone shutter for good.

When Murphy first met Ingram it was at a table 
beside the fireplace. By now, Antony Stark had 
gathered around him a formidable cladding of 
specialists and consultants, and his bid to 
convert the Lion into flats was gathering pace. 
Hoping for some support himself, Murphy invited a 
member of the local Camra branch to the pub, and 
they brought along Ingram. While Murphy explained 
what was happening at his pub, Ingram listened 
carefully – applying the three-part test she used 
to determine whether she would take up a pub’s case or not.
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/the-death-and-life-of-a-great-british-pub#img-7>
Regulars at the Golden Lion.
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/the-death-and-life-of-a-great-british-pub#img-7>
  Customers at the bar in the Golden Lion. 
Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

First: did the resistance effort look to have 
staying power? “Because some people get 
outraged,” Ingram explained, “but that only gives 
them the courage and energy to start a campaign.” 
Second: in terms of its architectural or social 
value, would the Golden Lion qualify for 
protection? In other words, was it a Little 
House, worth defending for its looks, or a 
Castle, precious for its soul? Her third check, 
applied without apology, was whether Dave Murphy 
was going to be able to pay her. She would be no 
sort of pragmatist, as she believed a 
conservationist must be, if she worked for free.

Ingram judged that Murphy had the stomach for a 
fight and “wasn’t going to give up and fold his 
tent after six months”. Would the Lion qualify 
for special protection on the basis of its 
architecture alone? Probably not. But noting 
instead its “street presence”, and hearing the 
stories of regulars at the bar, Ingram let 
herself be convinced it had a more intangible 
worth. Finally she told Murphy, “if I’m going to 
act for you, you need to instruct me – that is, 
pay me.” Murphy didn’t balk. They shook hands. Now what, he asked.

Though her numbers were not official, Ingram had 
roughed out some figures about the number of 
endangered pubs that inspired a campaign of 
resistance. “If you’re a developer, and you 
develop pubs, and you’ve bought six pubs to 
develop,” Ingram said, “then one of those is 
going to blow up in your face. It’s like Russian roulette.”

She told Murphy they must do what they could to 
make the Golden Lion a live bullet.


6.What makes a pub worth saving?

In recent times it has become a commonplace to 
walk by a boarded-up building, or a cactus of 
scaffolding, or a hummingly new supermarket, and 
feel something like grief: for the pub that used to be there.

It is possible to feel deprived of a vanished pub 
even if it was one you never made use of, just as 
a church can be reassuring to the irreligious – 
for being redoubtable, bracingly old, with doors 
more often open than not. 
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/pubs>Pubs 
are potent and strange like that. You can take 
against one on instinct, even when it meets every 
idiosyncratic item on your wants list, then fall, 
hard, for a shithole. You can step inside an 
unfamiliar pub and know immediately, in the 
belly, that you have made an error. And you can 
step into another and think: second home. The 
discovery of a new pub, its signboard thrust out 
at the intersection of roads and announcing it 
the Colourful Animal, the Royal’s Body Part, the 
Two or Three Somethings, can be absolutely 
elating in a way that is beyond the powers of a 
Tesco Express. The pubgoer who has ever tried 
visiting a Real Irish Pub in Gothenburg, or an 
Old English Tavern in departures at Nashville 
airport, will agree the format resists export.
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/the-death-and-life-of-a-great-british-pub#img-8>
An antique till at the Golden Lion.
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/the-death-and-life-of-a-great-british-pub#img-8>
  An antique till at the Golden Lion. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

But what is that format? If you feel a quiet 
elation on entering a pub, knowing it to be right 
– or right for you – it is because a thousand 
tiny prejudices are being met. Tearaway rack of 
Scampi Fries, or a big jar of flavour-shocked 
cashews? These things matter. Real ale? Branded 
glasses? Football? Racing? A quiz? Fizz out of 
bottles, or the gun? Inviting dad-jokes on a 
blackboard outside, or a members-only vibe – a 
sense that to put a pound on the pool table, at 
least without an understanding of native 
convention on the matter, would be to chance an 
outrage? Blessed anonymity, or a vocal welcome?

A pub is oddly difficult to describe. Neither 
Dave nor Mary Murphy, when asked, could define 
one to their satisfaction. Greg Mulholland, MP 
for Leeds North West, who has chaired a 
parliamentary 
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://gregmulholland.org/en/article/2013/0685701/cross-party-mps-from-parliamentary-save-the-pub-group-table-new-motion-in-support-of-fair-deal-for-your-local>Save 
the Pub Group since 2009, told me that a large 
part of his working day went trying to fix in 
precise, lawmakers’ language exactly what pubs 
are and what they mean to people. (“Slow-going,” 
said Mulholland of the effort.) Dale Ingram, 
asked what made a pub a pub, requested extra time 
and later emailed me a definition that ran to 600 words.

Try describing a pub for yourself, without 
resorting to cultural shortcuts – Marlowe, Moll 
Flanders, Peggy Mitchell, Withnail, Shaun of the 
Dead – and likely you will wind up describing 
what it isn’t. A pub is not a bar. It is not a 
restaurant. It is not a social club. It is not a 
shop. It is not a bench in a park. It is not a 
surgery or psychiatrists’ office. It is not a gig 
venue, a football stadium, a fighting pit, a 
staff room, a piano room. It is not the house you 
grew up in, nor the atrocious digs you moved to 
in your 20s. It is not your present-day living 
room. It is not a bus shelter. And in some way it 
is all those things. It is a pub.

In the terminology used by British planning 
departments, a pub is an “A4”. Should a developer 
have ideas about an A4’s cleverer use as flats, 
much of their time and treasure is spent trying 
to wrest it from this curt classification. In 
December 2012, Camden council received a formal 
bid from Stark’s planning team to convert the 
Golden Lion from an A4 into a “dwelling house”, or C3.

A year in preparation, this was an awesome 
submission, full of photographs, schematic 
diagrams, cutaways, an architect’s mapping of the 
Lion as it was and how it could be. Included, as 
well, were reports relating to energy use, light, 
waste management, and proposed works to the roof 
and basement, as well as copies of annual 
accounts, sworn affidavits from interested 
parties, an assertive letter from Stark’s 
lawyers, and a selection of unflattering comments 
relating to the Golden Lion that had been made on 
the internet, including one from an anonymous 
contributor who had visited the pub four years 
earlier and found its pool table small. Attached 
too was a “supplemental report” on the Murphys’ 
performance as landlords. Some delicate 
disparagement was done, here, on their business 
acumen. “Even with the best will in the world, 
[their] accounts present a depressing picture,” 
the report read. As for the pub itself, in the 
opinion of the Stark camp it was “unlawful, 
inflexible, inaccessible, unsafe, insecure, 
inconvenient, and generally unsustainable”.

It is a condition of development bids that 
documents submitted to councils may be uploaded 
to the internet for common scrutiny. It isn’t 
clear how much the public knows of this 
opportunity to read along as efforts are made to 
reshape the neighbourhoods around them. Dale 
Ingram lamented how little the communities she 
had worked with knew of their rights when it came to planning.

As documents relating to the Golden Lion were 
uploaded to Camden council’s website, Dave Murphy 
read every one. He was fascinated to see frequent 
mention of Gavin Sherman, the estate agent from 
Paramount Properties who had first brokered the 
sale of the Golden Lion to Antony Stark.

Sherman (as Murphy read in the documents) was 
“the agent acting on behalf of Paramount” in the 
sale of the pub. That made sense. What was more 
confusing to Murphy was that, in other documents, 
Sherman was also described as the “representative 
of the client Antony Stark” in Stark’s 
application to convert the Golden Lion into 
flats. What was going on? The report on the 
Murphy family’s accounts at the pub – the one 
that was deeply critical of their profit-making – 
was authored by Gavin Sherman himself. Why had an estate agent written that?

Perplexed, Murphy could only conclude that, at 
the rough time of the Golden Lion’s sale, Sherman 
had switched careers: from property agent to 
property developer, joining forces with Stark. 
(Sherman denied this, describing himself only as 
an adviser to Stark at the time. Paramount 
Properties, Sherman’s former employer, declined 
to comment on the sale of the Golden Lion, other 
than to say its pub sales division had now closed.)

Murphy discussed the matter with Dale Ingram, and 
the pair had their first disagreement. If the 
landlord was upset at Sherman’s apparent double 
role in the upheaval at the Lion, Ingram was more 
sanguine. She agreed with Murphy that it looked 
odd; but she was used to incredible behaviour in the field.
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/the-death-and-life-of-a-great-british-pub#img-9>
Karaoke night at the Golden Lion.
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/the-death-and-life-of-a-great-british-pub#img-9>
  Karaoke night at the Golden Lion, which takes 
place every Tuesday and is usually the busiest 
night of the week. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

Ingram advised Dave Murphy to focus on their 
fledgling campaign, which had already suffered a 
blow. English Heritage had refused to list the 
pub for protection, apparently accepting Stark’s 
view of the flawed architectural character of the 
building. Ingram felt they should switch tactics, 
go small, personal. With her encouragement, 
Murphy set up a petition seeking local support 
that was signed by entire families – five Weirs, 
nine Grimwoods, innumerable Murphys – finally 
gathering 1,000 signatures, according to a later council evaluation.

Ingram nominated the pub for asset of community 
value, or ACV, status. This was a relatively new 
form of protection, introduced by the coalition 
government under the Localism Act 2011, intended 
to slow the number of pub closures around the 
country by limiting the ways a nominated building 
could be altered. Murphy and Ingram contacted the 
MP, Greg Mulholland, who sent a letter of 
support. When a pub enthusiast called Will Blair 
was selected to be the new Conservative candidate 
for the area, Ingram telephoned immediately. 
Blair recalled that it was his first day in a 
constituency office when Ingram called; he turned 
to a colleague afterwards and said, thrilled, “I 
think I’ve just been lobbied.” Blair promised his support.

Journalists from the Camden New Journal were 
invited to the Golden Lion to hear the Murphys’ 
story. The paper also approached Stark for 
comment and in its subsequent news story quoted a 
complaint from Stark’s camp that the function 
room at the Golden Lion had at one point been 
sublet to a clothes retailer, an action that 
would technically have invalidated the Murphys’ 
lease. Dave Murphy responded (then and later) 
that he had only lent the room to a friend who 
was storing clothes ahead of a jumble sale. Sworn 
affidavits on the matter were made on both sides.

In a mass of further submissions made to the 
council, the Murphy camp and the Stark camp 
continued sparring. The jukebox at the Golden 
Lion, it was said, had once been praised by Suggs 
from Madness - could the council countenance the 
loss of it? Royal College Street was often busy 
with traffic, Stark’s side pointed out, and given 
this “potentially hostile and dangerous 
environment” should the pub really be there at 
all? There was “cultural value”, the pro-Lion 
camp insisted, in the building having once 
appeared in an episode of One Foot In The Grave. 
If there was cultural value in its use on TV, 
retorted the Stark camp, then half the buildings 
in London would be untouchable. A member of the 
pub’s darts team confided to the council that the 
Lion was “the only place he could express himself 
in darts”. Stark’s representatives drew up a list 
of nearby establishments with dartboards, noting walking times to each.

A member of the darts team confided that the Lion 
was 'the only place he could express himself in darts'

Dave Murphy had left pre-printed council forms on 
the Golden Lion’s bar, so that regulars could set 
down their feelings about the pub and its 
possible closure. According to the comments on 
forms that were forwarded to the council, the 
Lion was “a social hub 
 An anchor 
 A backbone 
 
Old-style 
 An all-round pub
 Aclassic pub.” One 
customer wrote: “I want to drink a beer with my 
son in this old-fashioned pub when he is in his 
20s. He is just four now.” Another wrote, simply: “I wish you would refuse.”


7.Escalation

On 12 March 2013, Camden council refused the 
application to redevelop the Golden Lion. “The 
public house is considered to serve the needs of 
the local community,” planners wrote. Inside the 
Stark camp, the response was prompt. In emails to 
his team, Antony Stark said he intended them to 
pursue a two-pronged strategy. First, an appeal 
against the council’s decision. This would mean, 
under planning law, that the fate of the Golden 
Lion would be referred to the national Planning 
Inspectorate. Second, Stark wanted his team to 
submit a new application to Camden council, one 
that laid out different conversion plans for the pub.

In the new, revised scheme – call it Plan B – the 
building would still be heavily altered, its 
second, third and fourth storeys turned into new 
flats; but some form of pub would be retained at 
ground level. Stark’s chief planner, David Kemp, 
was uncertain about this. Could the Stark camp 
plausibly argue, in its appeal to the national 
Planning Inspectorate, that the pub was unviable, 
while at the same time submitting plans to the 
council that kept a pub on site? Kemp warned 
there would be suspicion about the authenticity 
of these representations. In early April, Kemp 
repeated his objections in an email to Stark. By 
May, Stark had a new chief planner.

She was called Carolyn Apcar. On 18 July 2013, 
under Stark’s instruction, Apcar lodged an appeal 
with the Planning Inspectorate, contesting Camden 
council’s decision to reject the Golden Lion 
redevelopment. And then, in a letter dated one 
day later, 19 July, Apcar sent on to Camden 
council the new Plan B, those sanitised 
conversion plans that would retain some form of 
ground-floor pub should the redevelopment be 
approved. In other words, on one summer day in 
2013, those who owned this piece of land in north 
London could insist its long-standing pub must 
go, and 24 hours later suggest that it should 
remain. And in the world of modern planning, Greg 
Mulholland told me, this was not so much 
laugh-out-loud contradiction as everyday stuff. 
“Cynical,” Mulholland called it. (The planner 
David Kemp, asked for comment, denied that he 
departed the Golden Lion project over any such 
disagreements about the second bid’s authenticity.)

The battle over the Golden Lion was spreading on 
to multiple fronts. As well as doing what they 
could to resist the Stark camp’s appeal – it 
would be heard by the Planning Inspectorate in 
winter 2013 – Murphy and Ingram were busy 
offering objections to the council about Plan B. 
At the same time, the Murphy family and Antony 
Stark were heading towards a confrontation in 
court, where a judge would have to decide whether 
the family could continue “holding over” at the 
pub now that their lease had ended.

John Murphy always said of his wife: she’ll keep 
going behind that bar until she drops. Now the 
Murphys had to seriously consider what Mary would 
do if they were turned out. Could she work at another pub?

The Murphys’ second premises in Highgate, the 
Duke’s Head, had been leased to a pair of young 
entrepreneurs who had found success there selling 
microbrews to a twenty- and thirtysomething 
crowd. Mary would not fit. There were no longer 
that many pubs around where she would. The 
pubscape around the Golden Lion had changed 
dramatically. The Black Horse and the Falcon, two 
longstanding neighbours along Royal College 
Street, were now flats. The Crown & Goose, just 
beyond a place called the Beatrice on Camden High 
Street, was scheduled for demolition. The Parr’s 
Head had gone. The Neptune had new flats on its 
upper storeys, the ground-floor pub behind 
chipboard. The Black Cap was said to be under 
threat. The Gloucester was already a hole in the 
ground. The Sovereign, run for so long by a 
regular drinker in the Golden Lion, a landlord 
named Denny Murphy (no relation), had been sold 
to a private development firm and remodelled. At 
street level the Sovereign was now a gastrobar 
called the White Moustache. Flats above.

Denny Murphy came in to the Golden Lion more and 
more often now. His tenancy at the Sovereign had 
ended, and he sat at his customary table near the 
dartboard. When he stood up to go to the toilet a 
barmaid topped up his pint without being asked. 
Denny was welcome at the Golden Lion as often as 
he wanted to come in. Still, for all their 
affection, he offered the Murphys an unnerving 
glimpse as to what might become of a publican 
without their pub. “Suddenly you look around,” 
said Mary Murphy. “And you think, ‘But all mythings are here.’”

One day in December 2013, Ingram telephoned Dave 
Murphy and asked him if he was sitting down. This 
had become a game of theirs, something to keep up 
spirits. If there was some small piece of good 
news to pass on, Ingram made a bigger deal of it 
by saying, “Are you sitting down?” Today she had 
the opportunity to say it twice. In the morning 
the national Planning Inspectorate had rejected 
Stark’s appeal on Plan A. That afternoon, by 
coincidence, the Golden Lion was made an asset of 
community value. Though this was not as solid a 
safeguard as a listing by English Heritage, it 
was something; it would mean the building’s owner 
could not react to his repeated disappointments by knocking the building down.

A shock-bulldozering actually happened in April 
this year, three miles from the Golden Lion. On a 
quiet road in north-west London, a pub called the 
Carlton Tavern was smashed to pieces by its 
owners. At the Carlton, there was a special 
hurry. English Heritage had suggested it intended 
to award the pretty 1930s pub a protective 
listing. So on a clear spring morning, two red 
bulldozers ripped into the structure, punching 
through the burgundy tile work with such haste 
that only a few slim plastic barriers were set up 
to keep disbelieving locals away. Ingram learned 
about the surprise demolition and telephoned 
English Heritage. An officer was sent in a taxi – too late.

As two red bulldozers ripped into the structure, 
an English Heritage officer was sent in a taxi – too late

By the time the bulldozers had withdrawn, the 
Carlton was half gone – cola bottles, lampshades, 
pieces of furniture and carpet, an old oven, even 
the brass licensees’ plaque visible among the 
rubble. At the time of writing it remains a 
wreck, girders protruding, chimney stacks 
exposed, the building open to the sky as if a 
passing giant has stooped to take a bite before lumbering on.

“That’s developers these days,” said Dave Murphy, when he heard. “Chesting it.”

The Stark camp had no intention of demolishing 
the Golden Lion; at least not at that point. All 
their efforts went in to getting approval for 
Plan B, with its new flats upstairs, and 
something open to the public downstairs; perhaps 
a pub, perhaps not. In this period it was never 
entirely clear what the Stark camp intended for 
the ground floor. Camden council was bombarded 
with plans, some that would add roller shutters 
to the building. As Will Blair, the parliamentary 
candidate who had kept up a continuing interest 
in the campaign, noted, this would suggest an 
intention to make the ground floor not a pub but 
a shop, maybe a bookmaker. There were discussions 
among Stark’s team, around this time, about the 
possibility of transforming the ground floor into 
an estate agent’s office. Would they need to 
include space for a staff room, a print station? 
Carolyn Apcar emailed Stark to voice concerns 
that aspects of the plan did not seem believable. 
Stark asked whether this mattered.

By the summer of 2014, Camden still had not come 
to a decision on Plan B, so Stark’s camp appealed 
that – the lack of a decision. The council 
responded tersely. Exactly as it stood (Camden’s 
chief planner wrote) the Golden Lion was too 
valuable a local asset to be fiddled with. And so 
Plan B was refused. Stark decided to launch 
another appeal with the national Planning 
Inspectorate. Gearing up for it, he hired a 
public relations firm, who set about knocking on doors in the neighbourhood.

The residents of Royal College Street already had 
a pub. Many of them seemed to like it. Now a PR 
firm was hurrying up and down positing an altered 
future. Wouldn’t it be cool, it suggested, if 
that pub was still there – only with improved 
toilets, a food-service kitchen, and slick flats 
on the upper floors? One local businessman who 
agreed to sit down and take a meeting with 
Stark’s PR agents told me he came away feeling 
confused, unsure about what the pub was being 
changed into, or why it should change at all.

In the world of pub redevelopment there is a 
tradition, Ingram explained, of what she called 
“Trojan horse” applications. Developers can 
respond to the refusal of their all-in bids to 
convert by proposing a more palatable 
half-and-half scheme. (A pub retained, for 
instance, on the ground floor.) Once they have 
secured approval, they can then bed in, trust 
their deep financial reserves, and play a longer 
attritional game. They might throw up hoardings 
and scaffolding and leave the project to simmer 
for a year or more. What tended to happen was 
that objectors, walking past a derelict ruin or a 
rubbish-strewn construction site week after week, 
would become more amenable to the notion of 
something – anything – being built. Ingram said: 
“Landlords or community groups say to themselves: 
‘Well, I did want to win. But now I just need it to be over.’” So flats.

In September 2014, the Murphy and Stark camps 
regathered before the Planning Inspectorate for 
the new appeal. Ingram joked that it was “like a 
reunion”. With her to make the case for the 
Golden Lion were Dave Murphy, two representatives 
from Camden council (by now firmly on the side of 
the Lion), and a mixed gang of supporters 
including local councillors Roger Robinson and 
Tom Copley, the Tory candidate Will Blair, and 
the pub’s best pool player, Shaun Pollard. As 
they took their seats in the hearing room, Ingram 
looked around the pro-Lion team she had gathered. 
Robinson was a teetotaller, someone who liked 
pubs as much in principle as in practice. Blair, 
for all his enthusiasm, was new to politics, 
unelected, without influence. Pollard had 
spearheaded the pub’s 2010 league championship. 
Still, this was not a crack squad.

Representing Stark were the planner Carolyn 
Apcar, alongside a QC, a solicitor, an architect, 
a PR man, and at least two hired consultants. How 
much, wondered Ingram – a few thousand pounds a 
head? The QC, she noted, “wouldn’t have been on a penny less than 10 grand”.

It was a long and tense hearing. Customers and 
supporters of the pub stood up in the public 
seats to make speeches. There was a long stretch 
of involved and draining debate about various 
intricacies of the Stark camp’s plans, including 
their notion to install roller shutters along the 
front of the Golden Lion. This, Ingram insisted, 
was an indicator of the risk to the pub’s future 
under Stark. After a few months or years, she 
guessed, the ground floor would be turned into 
something like a betting shop. “What are these 
roller shutters for?” she demanded of the 
opposition camp. “Nobody’s given a satisfactory answer!”

Turning to the planning inspector, Ingram said, 
“This is a Trojan Horse.” It was the most 
exciting moment of the day. “Is the appellant 
truly intending to keep the pub in use? I think the answer is clear.”

Stark and Gavin Sherman were present at the 
hearing, sitting in the public seats. (Stark told 
me “there was nothing ‘Trojan horse’ or 
misleading” about any of his planning 
applications.) The developer sat in the front 
row, wearing an open-necked and brightly coloured 
shirt. His muttered commentary on the 
proceedings, to Sherman, sitting beside him, 
infuriated others in the public area. Stark did 
not speak publicly that day, though occasionally 
he approached his lawyer and his planner to 
whisper instructions. Otherwise he sat with his 
arms folded, his legs stretched out, squeezing a 
bottle of mineral water, or typing on his phone.

Only the day before the hearing, Stark had 
exchanged emails with another consultant, this 
one a specialist in toxicity. There might be a 
more novel way of getting the Murphy family to 
leave the Golden Lion. An asbestos survey at the 
pub, the consultant had informed Stark over 
email, was a reliable way to insist sitting 
tenants move out. Stark was even recommended a 
specific surveyor, reasonably priced, who could 
be depended on to submit the sort of findings required.


8.

The Golden Lion’s fate is decided

That asbestos survey never took place. On 2 
October 2014, the Planning Inspectorate rejected 
the Stark camp’s appeal – a final no – and 
suddenly, unexpectedly, Dave Murphy was made 
aware that Antony Stark might sell him the pub. 
At first the landlord found this hard to believe. 
He could not shake the feeling that the whole 
thing was some sort of last-minute feint, meant 
to absorb what was left of his fighting fund, or 
his resolve. But negotiations began, and they 
continued through Christmas into 2015. In their 
dealings with each other, through intermediaries 
and solicitors, Murphy and Stark were irritable, 
defensive, not always logical, making the tired 
swipes of boxers late in a fight.

Even while they were deep in negotiations, Murphy 
said he was offered £100,000 by Stark to pack up 
and go. There was an abrupt demand, in the middle 
of the talks, for some of the earnings from the 
pub’s Dream Machine to be shared. It amounted to 
a few hundred in coins, Murphy guessed. Was Stark 
joking? If the deal fell through, the landlord 
and the developer would still have to go to court 
over the disputed tenancy. “It was very tense, very difficult,” Murphy said.

Stark had bought the Golden Lion at the end of 
2011 for £690,000. Now, at the end of 2014, he 
would sell for twice that. By this time, Murphy 
had become a father; his girlfriend, Jen, had 
given birth to a daughter, Evie. Trying to decide 
whether to pay such sums for the pub, Murphy 
worried he was gambling with his daughter’s 
future. At the same time he imagined himself, one 
day, passing the building on to her. He agreed to 
pay Stark £1.4m for the Golden Lion.

The deal was completed on 25 February 2015. When 
Murphy called Dale Ingram, she was inside another 
pub, the Duke of Wellington in Spitalfields, east 
London, starting up a new campaign. When her 
phone rang she had to duck inside the ladies’ to 
hear what he was saying. Murphy repeated himself. 
“Dale,” he said, “are you sitting down?”

Ingram was lastingly delighted by the success of 
the Golden Lion campaign, and moved to tears that 
day in the Duke of Wellington’s loo. Dave Murphy, 
however, remained flintier in the aftermath: 
never able to fully unload himself of three 
years’ worth of layered fury. When in the spring 
he threw a party, to thank people for their 
support in the campaign, his was by far the 
sternest face in the saloon. He had his pub. His 
mother had her home. His daughter had her future. 
But it had all cost Murphy twice as much as it 
might have done – had Admiral Taverns ever 
answered his emails about making a bid for the 
pub, back in 2011, or had he ever known of Gavin 
Sherman’s “discreet” marketing of the pub that 
year, or had he ever been invited into the sale 
process at all. “Bittersweet,” Murphy described 
the feeling, drinking at the bar as the party got 
under way. It seemed unlikely that the Golden 
Lion would ever be worth the £1.3m he had just 
paid for it; not unless he chopped up the building and turned it into flats.
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/the-death-and-life-of-a-great-british-pub#img-10>
The Golden Lion pub in Camden
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/the-death-and-life-of-a-great-british-pub#img-10>
  A darts player chalks up their score at the 
Golden Lion. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

The party lasted for many hours. Three teenagers, 
pale and clutching electric guitars, played All 
My Loving on a little stage by the mantelpiece. 
Customers queued three-deep at the bar, a little 
boy walking through at belly height. John Murphy, 
who had been unwell for some time, made an 
appearance and sat among a group of friends. He 
said, softly: “Fair play to David, he’s a good 
lad, he soon a put a stop to those guys.” Ingram 
sat outside, drinking pints with Will Blair.

Over the next hour, Ingram and Blair were joined 
on their bench by a shifting cast of north London 
irregulars, including a stand-up comic in a tight 
V-neck, an addled street-wanderer asking the way 
to the nearest phone box, a taxi full of football 
fans who had just left a match at Wembley, and a 
shaven-headed man wearing a bright red leotard 
who introduced himself as “Michelle, if I still 
had my wig on”. Michelle had earlier in the day 
been at a protest outside the Black Cap, a gay 
pub on Camden High Street that had closed 
suddenly and was not expected to reopen. Will 
Blair had also been at the protest. “A closure 
out of spite,” he thought, “because the owners 
couldn’t get the redevelopment through that they wanted.”

Nine months had passed since the final Golden 
Lion hearing and Will Blair could not shake his 
irritation about it. The young politician had 
already given an unsparing account of Stark’s 
behaviour in the public gallery that day, via his 
political blog: “Rolling his eyes and making 
sarcastic comments every time a member of the 
public stood up to voice their concerns.” Now, on 
the outdoor bench, he railed once more at Stark. 
“Sneering. Muttering. His whole body language 
suggested: ‘This is ridiculous, who are these 
people?’ I thought, ‘But who are you?’”

It was a question worth asking. Cities have 
always been fluid and malleable, frustratingly or 
impressively determined by those who own scraps 
of them; and if a Victorian landowner named 
Hetherington might knock down and rebuild the 
Golden Lion at the end of the 19th century, then 
another named Stark might very well try to close 
and whitewash it today. Even so, Blair’s question 
might usefully be posed, along the way. Who are you to initiate these changes?

The CEO of Admiral Taverns, Kevin Georgel, told 
me that, from this year, his pubco would seek to 
have “a better understanding of the background of 
the people we’re selling our pubs to”. Georgel 
said this was prompted, in part, by “a very 
rigorous” internal investigation he had launched 
into the sale of the Golden Lion to Stark in 
2011. Though Georgel had come to be satisfied 
that there was nothing unlawful in that 
transaction, he said: “We seriously regret the 
grief that David and his family have been through.”

Stark did not respond to invitations to be 
interviewed for this article. Later, however, he 
offered written comment over email. “The 
unfortunate reality is that not enough people 
within local communities are drinking in their 
local pubs any more,” he said. He pointed out 
that, during the financial year in which he 
bought the Golden Lion, the pub made a loss of 
£617; and that a year later the pub made a profit 
of just £55. Stark wrote that any suggestion that 
he had made an effort to drive the Golden Lion 
under, in order to increase the likelihood of his 
turning the pub into flats, was “demonstrably 
untrue. The business was loss making.” It was 
already under, was the suggestion, when he bought it.
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/the-death-and-life-of-a-great-british-pub#img-11>
Regulars at the Golden Lion.
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/the-death-and-life-of-a-great-british-pub#img-11>
  Tuesday night at the Golden Lion. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

Greg Mulholland, chair of the parliamentary Save 
the Pub group, told me that to consider bottom 
lines alone, in the matter of pubs, was 
misguided. “It’s very mistaken to think that, if 
someone is making a basic living running a pub, 
and is happy, and is providing a community 
service, that that isn’t useful. Don’t forget: a 
pub will be employing people, paying tax, 
contributing to the economy. They are useful. Not 
every business has to be enormously profitable to 
be that.” In the summer the MP spoke to me of 
potential legislation that would insist that a 
pub, should it ever be made available for sale, 
be available first as a going concern. Dibs, 
Mulholland meant, to the buyer who wanted to keep 
serving beer. Even if that meant turning an annual profit of £55.

At his pub, now his pub, Dave Murphy was free of 
the beer tie. He could pay the £85 his kegs of 
Carling were worth. He was busy: a wake was due 
to take place in the saloon midweek, and he was 
taking calls on his mobile to arrange the 
transfer to the Golden Lion of a quiz that had 
once been staged at the Black Cap. Murphy was 
sympathetic to the plight of other troubled pubs 
in the area, always sad to hear of closures. At 
the same time, he now had a frightening mortgage 
to meet and was keen to the potential for refugee punters.

There were many. The Victoria in Mornington 
Crescent had vanished behind scaffolding. The 
Crown & Goose in Camden was pulled down. A pub up 
the Holloway Road, also called the Lion – this 
one a boisterous Irish boozer on the Archway 
roundabout – had been bought by a limited company 
called Lion Archway Ltd; joint directors, Antony 
Stark and Gavin Sherman. They had taken on the 
pub earlier in 2014 and in November they sold it, 
to a company with designs on it becoming a coffee 
shop. Hoardings went up. Nearby, a pub called the 
Good Intent also closed, pulled down to make way 
for flats. The windows of the Dartmouth Arms in 
Dartmouth Park were chipboarded and blackened. 
The Richard Steele in Belsize Park and the Lord 
Stanley in Camden Square were said to be under 
threat. Nobody knew which pub would be next.

One day, Dave Murphy was at work when he received 
a phone call from an unknown number. It was an 
estate agent, acting on a rumour going around the 
local property market. Apparently there was 
someone new on the scene, paying large sums of 
money for available pubs – and the name they’d 
heard was Dave Murphy’s. On the phone that day 
the estate agent told Murphy, listen, keep it 
quiet. But there’s another place in the area 
that’s available, the Beatrice on Camden High 
Street. Only be discreet if you go and look 
around, because the landlords there don’t know it’s up for sale yet.

• Follow the Long Read on Twitter at 
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/https://twitter.com/gdnlongread>@gdnlongread, 
or sign up to the long read weekly email 
<http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/13/http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/jul/20/sign-up-to-the-long-read-email>here

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.gn.apc.org/mailman/private/diggers350/attachments/20151014/4b99e032/attachment.html>