Our Responsibilities
Pubs at the heart of their communities
We’d like our pubs to make as little negative impact to our surrounding nature as possible.
When we first open we work with our neighbours to establish the right amount of lighting in our carparks – enough to be safe, but not to cause a local nuisance to residents and wildlife and it turns off to reduce electricity waste when we are closed.
We focus on gardening from a Biodiversity point of view, exploring how we can use more native British plants, collect and reuse rainwater and utilise our spare space by planting wild flowers beds, encouraging wildlife through installing bird and bat boxes and hedgehog houses as well as working with local groups to see if the community would like to utilise the space for wider benefit.
Whilst we love a nice lawn for picnic benches and stone patio for afterwork drinks in the sunshine, we also love packed flower beds encouraging insects and hedgerows for animal cover and food, and who doesn’t love a herb garden? A good mix of plants is the key and having real enthusiasts on the team that genuinely love our gardens as their own. We are very fortunate to have such knowledgeable and passionate people.
We have taken part in ‘No Mow May’ this year, leaving a patch of our lawns wild for the month for continued insect and bird feeding. This one is new to us, so we are interested to see what happens.
We are fortunate to have some pubs with ponds and are keen to nurture them, so we often survey the health of them. Some sadly have become stagnant and are not doing anything to sustain the wildlife that could live there. Where this is the case we introduce a programme of regeneration, installing a circulation pump to regenerate the water if needed, replanting or restocking with fish if this is called for.
Not a particularly glamorous topic, but a really important one in you live in a village with a busy pub. The disposing of fat is a big issue in the world. You hear of hideous stories of ‘fatburgs’ building up in busy cities and we do not want to be the cause of anything like that! We recycle our cooking fat into biodiesel (have a read in our ‘Sustainability section’ if you’d like to know more about that) but it’s inevitable that we generate other ‘fat’ from our many cooking processes. We fit ‘grease traps’ into our pubs. These are a safe guard so that if any fat mistakenly makes it down the sink we can collect it and dispose of it more responsibly. Or, in some pubs where we have enthusiasts in this area, we use it to make fat balls to pop in our gardens to feed the birds. It’s an area that we work closely with our kitchen teams on as clogging up local drainage systems can be a real problem.
Moving onto a nicer topic… we continue to support all sorts of formal and informal charities.
In 2023, through the amazing efforts of our crew in the pubs we raised a grand total of £94,295.
Our pubs choose charities that are important to their local communities or the crew within them, so the money raised is for all sorts of different worthy causes. They also choose how they would like to raise the money, so that could be through raft races, duck races, sponsored moustache growing, bake sales, walks, swims, cycles or simply by asking their customers to try and balance a 20 pence piece on a floating lemon.
Every now and then we also organise something a little bigger and send out an open invitation, for all to join in if they fancy it. For the last few years we have organised a 2 day sponsored hike up (and down, and up and down again) Snowdon and the surrounding mountains. With almost 50 crew taking on the challenge, this event looks set to be around for years to come.
For those not quite as athletic there is an annual golf day open to everyone, raising money and socialising in the sunshine at the same time and we’ve always got one or two pub football teams doing the rounds!
Our crew are super keen to give back to their local communities and we’re always on the lookout for volunteering opportunities. So, if you have a Scout hut that needs painting, or are a local Food Bank or pretty much anything community based then we’ll happily get involved so please do let us know.
We tend to attract a crew made up of walkers and outdoorsy people (perhaps that’s because we are also combatting being food lovers!) and if you throw in a dog too, most are smitten. So many of our pubs run a community pub walk once a month. It’s a chance to get to know everyone a little better and we hope it helps to bond our local community and combat loneliness.
