Refurb and Interiors: From the flames...

THIS WEEK an advert will be placed in an East Devon local newspaper thanking customers of the Blue Ball in Sidford, near Sidmouth, for sticking by the pub after it was razed to the ground by a devastating fire in March last year.

These punters have had good reason to come back, however - the Punch site has been faithfully rebuilt as a replica of the 1385 original, a pub successfully run by the Newton family since 1912.

The minimal changes have included the addition of three new letting rooms and a new function room with capacity for 80 people. The Blue Ball now has nine en-suite bedrooms to let, thanks to previously unusable loft space being made available in the new building. The function room was a barbecue patio area in its old incarnation.

Roger Newton, the latest family member at the helm, takes up the story. "The fire was devastating," he says. "Around 100 people were in the pub and 10 upstairs in the bedrooms, when it went up in flames as a result of a chimney fire at 7pm on a Saturday. Thankfully, no-one was hurt, but lots of family bits and pieces - our history - were lost in the blaze."

Starting again​

For Roger, leaving never crossed his mind. And, when it came to the redesign, the old adage 'if it aint broke, don't fix it' applied to a pub which was turning over £1.2m at the time of the fire.

"Punch immediately got onto me and said 'you are going to stay, aren't you?' But we never hesitated. What we were doing was pretty successful," he says. The addition of extra rooms is a mere tweak, and Roger adds: "It's early days, having only been open six weeks but it's all looking good."

So the Blue Ball, which was a Grade Two listed building, has been rebuilt to reflect its original character. It has a traditional wooden beamed bar with open fire and a traditional thatched roof. Punch business relationship manager Chet Greenslade said he hopes that "many generations of Roger's family continue to run this delightful country pub".

Roger believes this could be a case of every cloud having a silver lining… or a blue one, at the very least.