The hospitality trade has endured a tumultuous few years, with pubs and bars closing every week. KEN TOWL talks to two Croydon businesswomen about how they are coping with the obstacles placed in their way
Live music: The Oval Tavern’s Esther Sutton can’t promise live Morris dancing every night, though
This is a tale of two of Croydon’s most interesting and characterful drinking dens. They have much in common and yet they are very different. Both help to make Croydon what it is.
One is a pub, the other a wine bar. Both have had to weather the storms of covid and inflation, one is in a residential street, the other in a shopping centre.
It is quite likely that, although you may have heard of it, you have never been to Bishop’s Wine Bar.
You probably don’t go to the Whitgift Shopping Centre as much as you used to. And that is part of the problem.
As the Whitgift experiences a pernicious cycle of closure of shops causing reduced visitor numbers causing reduced investment in infrastructure causing closure of shops… so Bishop’s suffers with it. The latest – and potentially final – straw for Bishop’s and its owner Angela Ferrara has been the closure of the Allders car park.
No sign of business: the Whitgift Centre’s promised signage for Bishops Wine Bar have yet to appear. But the Allders car park is firmly closed
The wine bar is nestled in nook beside the car park that you have to pass through to get into the shopping mall. The car park closure cuts off any hope of visibility or passing trade. To access Bishops from inside the mall, you have to select a darkened, otherwise unoccupied, corridor signed only with the legend “Bishops Courtyard Car Park”.
I was able to find it because I had checked its location on Google Maps. I asked Angela how business is going and, unsurprisingly, it is not going well. Trade, already weak, had dropped off since the closure of the car park at the beginning of June.
The shopping centre’s management, which now comes under Westfield – the people who want to open up seven “kiosks”, including food and drink outlets in the front of the long-vacant Allders building, on North End – have promised to put up signage from the car park. But after nearly three months, this has not yet happened.
The way into the wine bar from Wellesley Road looks forbidding enough during the daytime. I tried it. It is possible, but you feel like a trespasser. While Bishop’s Facebook page suggests that the bar is open till 11pm most nights, it is not. Most days it shuts when it gets quiet. If it has to rely on access from the shopping centre itself, then it will only be able to open till 7pm at the latest. These days, the Whitgift, unloved and unvisited, is sometimes closing earlier than that.
Cheers!: with Angela Ferrera behind the bar, Bishops is ‘a bolthole… like a bar/tabac in France,’ according to loyal customer Gale. ‘I wouldn’t come into Croydon if it wasn’t here.”
When Angela locks up at the end of the day, the kind people at Whitgift have said that, if she alerts their security office just before she leaves each evening, they will watch her via their CCTV cameras. Unsurprisingly, this isn’t as reassuring as the Whitgift management seem to think it is.
The economy has not been kind to the hospitality trade anyway, but when you are situated in a shopping centre where the shops are closed and the after-work crowd are working from home, then you really are in trouble.
Angela thinks that the Whitgift could spruce the place up, try to bring people in, but “there doesn’t seem to be the will to do it”. A walk around the Whitgift would suggest she is right. The management appear to be letting the place wind down.
It would be a pity to see the place die. As one loyal customer, Gale, put it, “It’s just one of those places, a bolthole. It’s like a bar/tabac in France, you feel safe here.
“I wouldn’t come into Croydon at all if it wasn’t here.”
Gale is one of a group of super-loyal customers who I find in the bar in the middle of a Wednesday. They are a friendly lot but, on their own, they are not enough to support the bar, especially given the low prices of the drinks. Pint bottle of ale? Just £4. Medium glass of wine? £5.25. There is, obviously, only one way to keep this place open. Just get there early!
A little way across town, we have The Oval Tavern, described by its manager Esther Sutton as “a community local as well as a music venue”. It seems to be very good at both.
Fortunately, for all of us, the prices are kept at the community pub level rather than the music venue level. All real ales are £4.90 per pint (currently on tap they have Proper Job, Tribute, Black Sheep and Butcombe Original) and a medium glass of Malbec (described as “fine” by my friend Ashley on a recent visit) will set you back £6.35.
Esther reckons she will have to review the prices soon, having held them for the past 18 months or so. The Oval is a substantial building and energy costs have risen and do not look like getting better any time soon.
That community outlook of The Oval came to the fore during covid, when the pub’s kitchens were used to supply takeaway food, particularly Sunday lunches, with staff using a cargo bike to deliver food around the neighbourhood.
Meanwhile NHS staff at Croydon University Hospital benefited from The Oval’s “Meals for Mayday”.
When the pub was allowed to re-open its garden, there were queues around the block for their “comfort-food-with-a-twist”, such was the demand for a socially distanced meal out.
Meals on wheels: during lockdown, Esther Sutton (right) and Oval friends kept residents and Mayday Hospital staff well-supplied
The Oval kept music alive, if not exactly live, by creating Zoom gigs and then, government-permitting, live-streaming concerts from the pub into people’s homes. Esther visibly shivered as she remembered an “outside, freezing cold New Year’s Eve DJ set”.
And the music has developed. For example, what was more of an open-mic session has become a headline spot for up-and-coming local folk musicians, “nurturing new talent, introducing musicians to each other”. Esther talks of creating a scene. No pub is an island, it seems, but rather, part of a scene.
And whereas the work-from-home crowd have deserted Bishops, some of them have turned up in The Oval. Maybe some liminal space between the communal and the commercial (both geographically and metaphorically) is the place to be.
Esther’s advice to anyone thinking about moving into the hospitality business? “You can’t beat genuinely good service,” she says. It is one thing you can control and it is free.
But she recognises that things are tough for the industry these days. You have to diversify and develop your offer. There are so many forms of home entertainment available to people and the trade has to compete with that.
It used to be easier, she says, “You used to just open the doors.”
Read more: Businesses on the brink as Whitgift Centre set to close car park
Read more: Much-loved Whitgift Centre café to shut down on Saturday
Read more: Barwell, Brexit and Croydon’s troubled Westfield dream
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I don’t know Bishop’s wine bar but the Oval is very inclusive, has the loveliest staff and great food.
I love the Oval Tavern – it’s my regular even though it’s a bit of a trek from South Croydon.
The open mic really is something special, especially as so many other avenues for local musicians to perform have disappeared. Esther and Dave who deals with the music side have done a great thing.
The Oval is a great pub, one of the best in Croydon – in truth there are many great places in Croydon to get a drink (much more than Bromley) and I hope that never changes.