Laurel investment rolls on with £1.25m venue

Laurel Pub Company, the managed operator owned by Robert Tchenguiz, has opened a new £1.25m Ha! Ha! Bar & Canteen venue in London's Victoria as part of its current £40m investment programme.

The Cardinal Walk venue has beaten its sales target, in excess of £50,000-a-week, during its first three weeks of opening.

Laurel chief executive Ian Payne said: "The footfall in this part of Victoria is huge and there isn't a huge amount of competition."

The investment programme for this year and next will see money spent on more than half of Laurel's 350 core sites - investment per site will average around £180,000. Tchenguiz has spent an estimated £440m on creating Laurel Pub Company so the capital spend exceeds 10% of the asset value bearing in mind the plans to sell 50 of Laurel's 400 sites.

Investments in the past week have seen the opening of new Slug & Lettuces in Bournemouth, Liverpool and St Albans, Hertfordshire, at two former Casa bars and a Bar Med site.

Capital spend in the estate in recent months has also seen the disappearance of several Hogsheads, including the flagship site off London's Leicester Square in Lisle Street, and one in Hove, East Sussex. Both have been converted to unbranded pubs.

Payne insisted, however, that, although no new Hogsheads would be opened, the brand would be retained where it was trading well - for example, a Hogshead in Hornchurch, Essex, has just re-opened after a refurbishment.

Payne also denied industry rumours that suggested like-for-like sales are down by around 9% across the Laurel estate.

"It's simply not true," he said. "The (one) issue is in the circuit where trading is tough."

Laurel is currently selling its 50 non-core venues through agent Davis Coffer Lyons.

A major segment of the core business, with as many as 100 sites, will focus on "quality food" with Slug & Lettuce, Ha! Ha! Bar & Canteen and Sante Fe, the Tex-Mex food brand that has shown sales growth for every week in 2006, as the lead brands.