One Croydon pub that definitely won’t be opening next week, or any time soon, is The Glamorgan on Cherry Orchard Road.
Get your message across: the Save the Glam campaign wants to spread the message
But campaigners want to highlight the building’s plight and win over more support for its eventual reopening as a neighbourhood local by inviting artists and beer drinkers to come up with a design for a beer mat to celebrate the #SaveTheGlam campaign.
The Save The Glamorgan group has been battling away for almost five years, and last month claimed another minor victory when developers Butlers Walsall Ltd withdrew their application to build an 11-storey block of 36 flats on the site, with a small “pub” space on the ground floor in a token effort to get around planning rules.
The Victorian-built pub building has been badly neglected, deliberately so, by its owners – or as the campaigners put it, ” trapped in the grip of a developer who wants it to be demolished and replaced by another anonymous concrete residential box”.
But locals, who won Asset of Community Value status for The Glamorgan in 2018, have not given up hope that they might one day get their opportunity to take the building on and refurbish it to its previous glories.
The #SaveTheGlam campaign has been fighting to save the Addiscombe local for nearly five years
The campaign is now looking towards May 17 – the date in the government’s “roadmap” out of coronavirus lockdown when all pubs can fully re-open – for their next steps.
“To draw attention to our campaign and reassure the community that we have not been lost in the fog of lockdown, we decided to target this date with a ‘Beer mat Broadcast’ associated with a ‘Socially Compliant Doorstep Protest’ on the steps of The Glamorgan.
“The details of the ‘Doorstep Protest’ will be hammered out as April progresses (or doesn’t). Meanwhile, we just need members to input the arresting and informative ‘Beermat Graphic’ (flippable) to be placed on said beer mat.”
The best design, or designs, will adorn hundreds of beer mats which will then be distributed around those local pubs which will be open for business om May 17.
The organisers say that the following points need to be followed by budding beer mat designers:
- Essential – reference to the #SaveTheGlam campaign (the beermat may be used in other protests)
- Reference to “the pub owners” is permitted but nothing more personal – after all, in Boris’s Britain, “Greed Is Good”
- Inclusion of #SaveTheGlam pages on Facebook and Twitter is encouraged, but our target audience knows how to use the internet
- Use of contrasting photos/graphics of The Glamorgan in its heyday and the proposed replacement Butlers Walsall concrete tenement is permitted, but the overall message – our pub isn’t re-opening and we’re angry – should not be overshadowed
Designs – front and back for your #SaveTheGlam beer mats – should be sent as soon as possible to: hughesrhiannon@hotmail.com; mullinsrl@hotmail.com; kenbrewster@btinternet.com; and ianwoodard8@gmail.com.
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I would also have thought in its previous style as a pub gastro restaurant it would appeal to the new residents in the apartment blocks as well as existing locals and have very sound economic base.