Yet another Croydon town centre pub has closed, as the food and drink business empire of a colleague of Mayor Jason Perry appears to be feeling the strain.
Freehold for sale: on offer for £800,000, the Mr Fox ‘cocktail pub’ has been run to ground
Signs for Fleurets, a specialist pub and hospitality property agency, appeared above the Mr Fox “cocktail pub” on Surrey Street this week, offering the freehold for sale on the building.
Asking price? £800,000 for a building that has a beer cellar, first-floor kitchens, ground-floor bar area and a three-bedroom flat upstairs.
The freeholder hopes to make the property available with “vacant possession”, once the position with the current leaseholder is resolved.
That current lease is held by one of the web of companies run by Andrew Taylor. Taylor is also the vice-chair of Croydon BID, the town centre’s business “improvement” district.
It was not so long ago that Taylor managed to snag himself a £28,000 culture grant from Croydon Council for a “Surrey Street Festival” that never actually took place.
Businessman Taylor, despite not having any obvious background in the arts, was somehow appointed to the council’s Borough of Culture steering group, the body which decided which projects were worthy of receiving a share of a £1million public arts fund
Big BID: Andrew Taylor, who is also behind Trickle and Fern bars
Taylor was ultimately obliged to return the £28,000 Borough of Culture grant, which was money that might have otherwise been allocated to genuine arts organisations. Of course, all those involved denied that anything untoward had gone on.
Croydon BID, where Croydon Mayor Jason Perry is also a board member, also got a £50,000 Borough of Culture grant, to line the streets of Croydon with fibreglass giraffes.
It’s beginning to look like those not-so-arty giraffes didn’t do much to improve business in Croydon, apart from, perhaps, for Croydon BID.
Taylor holds around a dozen company directorships, including the registered business behind Fern, the top-end cocktail bar at the foot of one of Croydon’s tallest buildings on George Street.
One of Taylor’s companies, Surrey Street Holdings Ltd, has not filed its accounts to Companies House since November 2023. Then, its accounts showed the business had more than £109,000-worth of assets.
Of other companies of which Taylor is director, Fern (George Street) Ltd was recently threatened with being struck off for failing to file its annual accounts in time. Fern’s latest financials, lodged at Companies House, show total assets of just £7,100 (as at August 2024).
Warning signs: Surrey Street Holdings Ltd is one of Taylor’s companies that has formal warnings for late accounts
No34 Surrey Street, on the corner of the alleyway that is Bell Hill, at the Church Street end of Croydon’s ancient street market, was once a proper pub called the Britannia Inn.
It became the highly stylised, up-market Mr Fox in 2019.
For £10, you could book an hour on their shuffleboard.
Then, around February 2025, Mr Fox closed. A suitably gushing announcement appeared (still appears) on their website: “After six incredible years, Mr Fox has closed for major refurbishment and will reopen in Autumn 2025 with a brand-new look!
“We will return with our legendary Sunday roast and cocktail menus, a brand-new beer offering, including real ale, live sports and the introduction of pub games, including a pool table and a dart board.”
Last orders: Mr Fox has been closed since February, ostensibly for refurbishment. But no work was ever started
They had never bothered to sell real ale in their pub before, while the promise of pool and darts appeared to signal the end for hipsters’ shuffleboard.
But no refurbishment works ever seemed to begin, and now, it appears that Taylor’s refurb plans have themselves been snookered altogether.
Mr Fox is the second pub on Surrey Street to be confirmed as closed in the space of a month, after the more down-to-earth Market Tavern closed its doors in September.
Meanwhile, there’s nothing on Croydon BID’s website to reflect the business difficulties facing its co-chair.
But if this is what Croydon town centre is like after 18 years of Croydon BID (whose directors include mall non-developers Westfield, the Centrale management and the Whitgift Foundation’s property managers, as well as those paragons of business Taylor and Perry), imagine what the place might be like by 2040.
Read more: Two more Croydon town centre pubs pull down the shutters
Read more: Five Guys is latest business to give up on Croydon High Street
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