Expert by Experience: Launching a Community Owned Hub in Greenwich

Image credit: Paul Scannell Photography

At Telescope, we’re working on a project to research and deliver a Community Asset Strategy for the Royal Borough of Greenwich. During our work, we came across The Star of Greenwich, a pub and community hub in the heart of East Greenwich, which reopened in 2022 under a community ownership model.

Led by three local people who wanted to see the space back in use and doing more for the community, it’s become a meeting place for a wide range of groups and organisations, as well as a friendly place for regulars to enjoy a drink.  

We spoke to James, a member of the team behind the pub’s reincarnation, about how the project came to life, and how his work within the charity sector has been a driving force behind it.

Can you tell us about how you first came to be involved in The Star of Greenwich and why you wanted to be part of a project like this, what was the spark for it?

The Star of Greenwich was an asset of community value, it shut down about three years ago and they lost all their licenses. It’s owned by the Greenwich Hospital Trust; they decided they wanted to sell it after it had been sitting empty for a year or two and had to put out a notice that they were doing that. A couple of us, myself and a friend called Kirsty, who is a parent at the nursery my kids go to plus her mate Lisa, saw that on Facebook and mentioned it, like this is interesting, we’ve been to the pub once or twice. I wouldn’t call myself a massive regular, there are certainly people who have been involved in it a lot longer, but because of my background, I knew a bit about the process with assets of community value. 

We initially set up a company and then ended up working out a plan, or at least some next steps, which really involved putting together this idea of it being much more a community space: a community space that was enabled by a pub, rather than a pub that happened to have a community space on the side of it. We talked a lot about how we wanted to help community groups and local charities, but ultimately the main aim of it is to get people who wouldn’t normally meet each other to spend time with one another, because we think that enables a richer, more friendly, nicer neighbourhood. Then if we scale that up, hopefully it can have an impact on society, but we’ve got to start somewhere.

And since then, we’ve been running all of those things that we were talking about. This morning down at the pub is English for Action, which is a charity that teaches people English for free, often refugees or people who’ve recently come to the country. We have affordable childcare during most of the week; stay and play stuff, drop in drop out sessions. We had the local life drawing class there last night, we had the East Greenwich Residents Association in there, we had the South East London Community Energy AGM. As people start to hear about us, we’re getting more and more of those community events in the space. We’re very lucky in the way the space is, because we’ve got two parts to it, we’ve got the main bar and then the community room, which can run very, very separately so you can have a lot of kids and community stuff in one side whilst still having a bit more of traditional pub in the other side. But the idea is that it’s not totally separated. As I said, the whole point is to get different people from different backgrounds involved in it. 

One of the interesting challenges that we’ve been looking at is how we make sure that the people who were involved in the pub before don’t feel that they’re being forced out, but more that it’s being opened up to be more inclusive and accessible than it would have been once upon a time. Otherwise, it’s just gentrification. There’s no point in swapping one kind of exclusion for another and we’ve done a lot of work on that.

And how have the people in the community responded to that, have they been keen to get involved?

Yeah, it’s been really interesting. If you look at the crowdfunder you can see two quite distinct groups. I would argue they are related to the groups of people that me, Kirsty and Lisa, are a part of. There are the folks who were there before and really wanted to save the pub itself, and bring back their local, and they’re still involved. And then at the other end, you’ve got folks who perhaps buy into the idea of the community change aspect of it at a bigger level. It’s not without its challenges, but the thing that has massively helped is that two of the bar staff, Annie and Maria, who used to run the pub have bought into the new vision for it and are the ones that do the majority of the bar work. It couldn’t have happened without them; they know all the people, they buy into and are broadly accepting of the new family and other stuff. 

It sounds like the community are really embracing it. Do you find the different groups have really got on board with the model?

Yeah absolutely, the community groups, the charities, we’re pretty unique in what we can offer. It’s always free for anyone basically, whether it’s a party, a community group. We only charge corporate stuff if someone’s hiring the room for the day or something, which we’ve done a couple of times. And we can offer them a drink, which isn’t that important to some of them but a lot of the groups are social and they’re community groups at the same time, like the East Greenwich Residents Association. They’re a group of people who’ve known each other a long time and do amazing work in the community, but it's quite nice to have a drink after all that.

That moves quite nicely into asking about the Community Benefit Society and how that works and why you chose that model?

We got some advice from the Plunkett Foundation. They’re really good in this area and support a lot of community owned pubs, they were the first people we spoke to right at the beginning when we were looking at the asset and community value stuff. It was their suggestion because it enables us to do the community share offering, which we haven’t done yet, but it’s a medium-term ambition. We’ll sell those shares – there’s tax benefits for the people buying them – and we want it to be a democratically run organisation. The idea is it’s not mine, Kirsty and Lisa’s, it’s the community’s, it’s that co-operatives model. We’re also a member of Co-ops UK, who have been really helpful with the governance side of things. Those two models together make sense to us, but at the time it wasn’t a hugely strategic choice. 

And do you see yourselves at some point in the future trying to expand this, or is this just a one-off?

The aim is to get through the first year and make it sustainable. The aim is to get an application in to the Community Ownership Fund, where we would use that, plus a community share offering to be at least a large part of the deposit for a commercial mortgage and we would buy the property. If we were able to do that, we might also be able to get some social investment or even commercial investment if it was through a bigger mortgage. It has a very big upstairs which is totally unused, so, the idea is, we could remodel that and those rooms could be community offices, charity offices, more childcare spaces, perhaps even an Air BNB or two to help with income. That’s what we’re hoping to achieve in the next year or two. 

How does that work for the people buying into the community share option, does that give them any involvement in the running of the pub?

Yeah absolutely. They then become members and have a voting right on that, so it’s democratic in the sense that no matter how many shares you buy, you only get one vote. And then there’s lots of governance: AGMs, boards and voting.

If you were going to give advice on implementing a model like this, what would you say?

Get as many different people involved in the core working group as possible, as many different places and perspectives. The reason it has worked up until this point is because me, Lisa and Kirsty bring really different things to the table, really different communities, different skills. I hadn’t even fully realised how lucky we were at the beginning to have that. 

Another thing I’ve found very interesting and working in the charity sector for a long time, working with volunteers is so completely different to working in a commercial, corporate environment, even in the charity sector. Navigating that, leading a team through that has been a good learning experience. 

How do you think local authorities could do more to support community spaces or projects like this?

Ideally have a strategy, make it clear the things they want to support and how. Fortunately, we ended up finding some helpful licensing people in the borough but that was just through luck rather than support or design with the council. But if it was attached to a strategy, I think it would have helped us get through that a bit quicker and more easily. Obviously, money would help, or some kind of funding. 

Just being more proactive about a partnership approach and having someone on staff to talk to. The Plunkett Foundation are amazing, there’s always someone we can ask there, Co-ops UK are the same. And we pay membership fees, it’s not big, a hundred pounds a year or something but that helps fund that post, which means we’ve got the help we need. I’d pay a hundred quid a year to have someone at the council that I could go to and ask about licensing or bin bags or this round of grant funding or whatever it is.

To find out more about The Star of Greenwich and their activity, have a look at their latest web update.