My Pub: 185 Watling Street, Northamptonshire

Located on the old Roman road, the 200-year-old building that houses 185 Watling Street Pub & Kitchen in Towcester, Northamptonshire, has been variously a butcher’s, bank, estate agent’s and, before Epic Pubs took it over two years ago, a residential home. Operations director Jonathan Taylor describes what makes the pub different and how proud he is to have returned the one-time coaching inn back to its roots.

The pub

We believe the pub was originally a coaching inn, built around the early 1800s. Since then it has been used in a number of different ways, – most recently as a residential house  – before we bought it back in the summer of 2015, and subsequently turned it into a pub.

It has always been a beautiful building on the high street of Towcester, and it’s great to have brought it back to life.

The purchase price was around £600,000 for the building. We then spent a further £650,000 on refurbishment works, then a bit more over time.

The front of the building is the oldest part, with a little bar snug we have decked out quite traditionally with a lot of taxidermy, and a morning room. Some of our older guests like to dine there as it’s a lot quieter and away from the bar.

We put a big extension on the back which mixes the old with the new.

Upstairs we converted two of the bedrooms into private dining rooms. One seats 14 to 16, the other eight to 10. They feel quite regal and glamorous but are, in fact, quite comfortable.

The company​

The pub is owned by Epic Pubs, which was set up by myself, Andrew Coath, Mark Austin and Wendy Twiddy in 2015. I’ve been in pubs for the last 14 to 15 years.

As a team we are well-knitted together, and are not only business partners but good friends.

Epic Pubs now has three pubs, but as one big group we now have eight trading pubs, with a couple more that will be open by the end of the year.

The ninth pub is opening at the end of October, and the tenth will hopefully come on board by the end of the year.

The team

The team is great, it’s very mixed. Our general manager, Alexa, joined us from running big Las Iguanas sites in central London. She and her partner have moved up to the Milton Keynes area, and she has the attitude and experience to operate the pub.

She’s a very bubbly person with fantastic experience and likes having fun – which is key in the town.

We have quite a lot of local people working for us as well: our breakfast manager has been here since the beginning. She is part of the furniture, and is absolutely fantastic. She helps develop and entertain our morning and afternoon tea trade.

We also recruit a few people who are travelling around the world. They spend six to nine months with us, go off travelling to Europe for three or four months, then end up with us again.

The trade

We have a good mix of people who come in.

Our daytimes are very much business lunches, dog walkers, ladies who lunch, then later in the afternoon we do a lot of afternoon teas.

On Friday and Saturday nights we have a great, buzzing bar trade and get a lot of youngsters in. Generally, we are not the cheapest place in the town, we are a little more premium. Our bar has fantastic cocktails, so we get people in their mid-20s through to late-30s for drinks on those nights.

Our menu prices are not overly expensive, we are accessible to everyone, so we have a real mix of age groups throughout most nights of the week. We are trying hard to be a pub for everyone.

The drink

We are a free house, so we can buy from where we want. We have a really good relationship with Towcester Mill Brewery, who are just across the road down a little lane. They have looked after us and helped us maintain our cellar standards.

We focus quite a lot on our cocktails: our bestsellers include the Porn Star Martini – something we sell upwards of a couple hundred a week. People love our cocktails.

We do great quality wine – we have 12 reds and 12 whites, and a good selection of Prosecco, dessert wine and Champagne. We also do a half-price Prosecco on a Friday evening, just to fill the bar up further, which has gone down well with locals.

The food

We are a British gastropub and have a simple menu.

At lunchtime we serve sandwiches and we have a good burger selection, with starters and a salad section as well.

Sunday lunch is one of our busiest days of the week. We always have hot roast potatoes and Yorkshire puddings on the bar for guests who are in drinking. We offer extra Yorkshire puddings and roast potatoes and vegetables with our roasts; we let customers have as much as they want on Sundays, which is really key.

The menu changes every quarter with the seasons, as well as daily-changing specials.

In order to maintain lunches Monday to Friday we have a bill of fare menu, which is a set price two or three-course lunch, which we find works very well with business trade at lunchtimes.

The events

We have a few weekly events and themed nights, including a steak night every Wednesday which celebrates the Herefordshire beef we sell.

There’s a menu of five to six steaks, with accompanying choice of potato and sauce. We have a board with all the cuts written on to show guests, giving them an experience where they may learn something at the same time. 

We are also starting a pub quiz, and we will be starting Chicken Tuesday, which has been very successful at the Anchor, another of our pubs. Starting at 6pm, it is a proper pub chicken menu, with chicken wings, beer chicken, half-chickens, and chicken burgers. It’s another reason for people to come out on a Tuesday night, traditionally one of the quieter nights in the week.

We also have two pub club events per month. These generally happen on a Wednesday or Thursday night and are food led. At this time of year, for example, we would start doing evenings such as a game and red wine night, where the chef will create a five-course game tasting menu matched with accompanying wines, with talks about how and why they match.

It’s a fun evening; we seat everyone who has booked at one big table so they have to make friends with one another, and we find that people return for these evenings once a month or whenever
they can. You see familiar faces, and it creates this club of people.

Other examples are port and cheese, pork-to-fork, and seafood evenings where our fishmonger will come in and do some filleting demonstrations with the chef and talk about where the fish come from.

These evenings are priced reasonably: a five-course taster night with matching wines is about £35 per head, which is very cheap.

It’s not about making money, it’s about building these regulars and this club of people who support us, and it means we can give something back. It’s a real talking point as well, it fills our social media and gets people talking about the pub. It’s really quite powerful.

The future

We have plans to develop the garden further next year. We are thinking about a covered bar area for outside, covering the patio. We are also looking to diversify into weddings.

What makes you special?

Locals didn’t really have anywhere nice to go to have lunch, dinner, breakfast or afternoon tea, and we were amazed at the response we got. The pub has had a community feeling since we opened.

The fact we have managed to turn a house back into a pub, where normally it is going the other way, is something I am quite proud of.

I think it feels very special how the building flows, the mix of the old and new, from the historic frontage, the morning room and bar snug, and the lovely private dining rooms upstairs, going into a modern open-kitchen restaurant area, then onto the patio out the back of the pub. 

Really it’s the people who work in the pub who make it, from the Aussie travellers we have for a few months, many of whom return, to our breakfast manager and our experienced and stable management team – the way they make the pub feel really makes it. That, and all our lovely locals.