Spirit spends £5½m on 23 London sites
Spirit Group, the managed arm of Punch Taverns, is spending around £5.5m on refurbishing 23 flagship central London sites.
The refurbishments aim to focus on creating a more traditional feel at historic sites such as the Punch & Judy in Covent Garden, which takes as much as £100,000 in peak weeks, and the Glassblower near Picadilly Circus.
Spirit has just over 100 pubs in the heart of London and hopes to complete another 20 refurbishments before the end of its financial year. So far, 12 refurbishments from the first set of schemes have been completed, with the remaining sites due to finish by mid-November.
Managing director Andrew Knight said: "We're aiming to put tradition back into these pubs. At the Punch & Judy, we've totally redesigned the upstairs area and added dark wood - it had very pale colours previously and plasma screens. But it's a pub that caters largely for the tourist trade in Covent Garden. Where we have tradition in a building, we want to add to it."
Other flagship pubs under review for schemes include the Anchor in London's Bankside - a pub that enjoys the best trading position in the most historic part of Southwark. Knight said: "It's just a fantastic site and we feel we can do a heck of a lot better with this."
Spirit has also been investing in a number of key sites outside of central London, such as Coopers in Glasgow and the Merlin in Edinburgh. Of trading in London, Knight added: "London is performing really, really well and the figures coming through (from the refurbs) are excellent."
