Great British Pub Awards

Pub Awards: Best Student finalist - The Cowley Retreat, Oxford

By James Evison

- Last updated on GMT

(lr) Emily Todd, GM of sister site, David Winstanley, area manager, and Evie Snook, GM of the Cowley Retreat
(lr) Emily Todd, GM of sister site, David Winstanley, area manager, and Evie Snook, GM of the Cowley Retreat
The Cowley Retreat is not marketed as a students’ pub and there is a clear desire to make it a space for everyone, rather than just the ‘beer and a burger’ student market.

But, when general manager Evie Snook was quizzed on the student offer, it was clear the venue definitely is a student-led pub, albeit it one with a large dose of community wet-led trade to back it up. The clear reasoning behind this was to alleviate the term-time seasonality of the business in a university city – and it has managed to be a ‘best of both worlds’ venue.

The discount offer is available to all, not just students, and the entertainment, although marketed to a student crowd, is also welcoming to an older/different demographic. The attempt to ‘premiumise’ the student offer with cocktails, locally-sourced food and craft beer would appear to be working, based on Saturday night turnover in a suburban area of Oxford.

The pub offers a compelling, and complete, offer for the student population; not only of the nearby Oxford Brookes University – but also the University of Oxford. The passion of the staff and the owners for making it a place that will become part of the fabric of the university experience was clear to see – and the events and offer represented this desire.

It was less a ‘retreat’ and more of an experience – a venue which you can imagine in a decade’s time reminiscing about with your old university chums, asking, ‘Remember that night at the Cowley?’.

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