Community acts to leash the Greyhound

A community group that stepped in to save a pub from closure is now battling to raise enough funds to buy the place.

The Greyhound Inn in Grizebeck, Cumbria, has gone from strength-to-strength since the team of local volunteers took it on just over a year ago. It has transformed so much that last month the 300 year-old-inn scooped Best Traditional Business in the Telegraph-sponsored Countryside Alliance Awards.

The group wants to form a co-operative to buy the Lake District based inn and ensure it stays open serving the community. Locals have organised a public meeting on February 27 where they hope to gather promises of financial support. After the meeting they will have just two months to match a bid already lodged with the current owners.

Vic Dunkley - director and member of the steering group that brought the pub back to life - said that he had been led to believe that the pub under the alternative bid would stop serving food and its accommodation would be developed into housing. The Greyhound currently serves locally sourced, traditional village food and everything on the standard menu costs less than £10.

Dunkley added: "The pub is based in a prominent site in an area where there is a massive lack of affordable housing - the site around it could be developed into four or five semi-detached or maybe eight terraced houses. The fear is, no matter what the reassurances are, that it could be closed completely and redeveloped in the future."

The steering group is currently drawing up a constitution to ensure the cooperative runs the pub with the community interests at its heart - with a share of the profits going, not just to shareholders, but local projects.

Dunkley said that the pub had "always been an integral part of the local community" where lots of local groups meet and that if it closed these ties and networks would start to "break down".