When the Bartons Arms announced its closure in January 2024, pub aficionados in Birmingham and across the country were shocked and saddened. The pub had perennially featured on lists of the city’s or even the countries best pubs, and had carved out a survival strategy as a destination pub where the draw of its unique architectural heritage and a reputation for well-kept real ale was complemented by excellent Thai food served in a rear dining room. How could this much-loved stalwart of the Birmingham pub scene – heritage listed since 1976 in recognition of ‘the intactness of this pub interior and the wealth of tile work’ and celebrated as one of the best examples from a ‘no expense spared’ period of late Victorian pub architecture – close so abruptly?
The story of the closure of the Bartons Arms begins, like so many stories about this grand old Birmingham pub, by marvelling at its imposing architecture, opulent interior and storied history. Although records show a pub called The Bartons Arms on the site as early as the 1860s, the pub which stands today was designed and built for Birmingham brewers Mitchell and Butler by noted Birmingham architects James and Lister Lea during 1900 and 1901. It boasts gabled rooves, an imposing clock tower and, once inside, extensive Minton tilework, some of the most extensive and best preserved in the country. The Stoke-on-Trent based company is even said to have brought a French designer over from Paris to design the floral tiles, making them more elaborate than the standards Milton tile designs that once adorned pubs across the Midlands. While a tile centrepiece depicting hunting scenes is somewhat out of keeping with the pub’s urban location and the city’s industrial identity, it is the ornate interior that appears in countless books, articles and TV items over the years.
As early as 1974 the pub was subject of a television news item framing the Bartons Arms in terms of its preservation. Preserved by The Media Archive for Central England, the film makes interesting contemporary viewing. More than a time capsule of a bygone era, the footage makes a delicate balance between a celebration of pub culture muted by concerns about the ‘survival’ of traditional pubs, foreshadowing the issues that would trouble the pub and its various owners over the coming decades.
The Bartons Arms is well known, much loved and in various ways much commented on. We were struck by how pub goers in other corners of the country, those we interviewed for our other case studies, knew of the Bartons Arms and spoke fondly of visiting a pub so easily described as ‘beautiful’ and ‘special’. Indeed, the pub stands out amongst our seven cases as the one pub that would almost unanimously be considered ‘worth saving’. And yet close it did. While the pub was shuttered for three years in the early 2000s, it is the more recent closures that concern us here – closing first from January to August 2024, when it reopened once again, only to cling on until July 2025 and another, decidedly more final, closure.
Even before its closure, the Bartons Arms begun to feel like a pub that couldn’t quite reconcile its history with its present. During our time researching the pubs and its closures, a recurring comment we heard from people was that the Bartons Arms was ‘a great pub, in the wrong place’. This is interesting, not least because it shows a general recognition of the importance of location to the viability of any given pub but also, by implication and in a more general sense, how a pub can, or should, feel in place. The Bartons Arms has stubbornly remained on the same quarter acre plot of land on the edge of Birmingham, its red brick walls, gabled windows and stately clock tower silent witness to the slow ebb of urban redevelopment.
The Aston Hippodrome, another James and Lister Lea building, opened next to the pub in 1908 and drew plenty of custom to the pub over the year. This includes its most famous patrons, Laural and Hardy, who stayed in the rooms above the pub whilst performing at the Hippodrome on a 1954 tour. The association between the famous pair, and the era they symbolise, was frequently invoked in stories about the pub and its eventual closure. On a wall in the front bar area a blackboard with the faces of Laural and Hardy sketched in white, beneath it the text “The famous Comic Duo Stayed Here Please ask a member of staff to show you around”. Tellingly, the latter part of this invitation was only partially obscured under a wash of white paint.
By 1960 the Hippodrome had closed, its final performance a striptease adding a sense of seediness emblematic of what must have already felt like a decline from the area’s heyday. The Hippodrome building lasted another 20 years as a bingo hall before being demolished and eventually in 1996. On the site rose The Drum Arts Centre, billed as the largest Black arts and culture venue in Europe. The Drum itself permanently closed in June 2016. Then in September 2019 a new independent Black-owned Business and Arts Centre, the Legacy Centre of Excellence opened and still operates on the site.
Over the years, the Bartons Arms looked increasing isolated while other changes have reshaped the look and feel of Aston, most notably the 1968 approval for 16 tower blocks along Aston New Road. Five of those blocks are now demolished, the remaining 11 looking down upon a cluster of retail units: an Aldi supermarket, fried chicken takeaway and charity shop. Also in the area, the HP Factory, an Aston landmark and significant local employer for nearly a century, closed in March 2007. Production of the condiments was controversially moved to the Netherlands by its owner Heinz, the iconic factory tower demolished before the year was out and parts of the wider site since turned into warehouse and cash and carry for an Asian food wholesaler cycle and mobility scooter manufacturing.
To better understand the recent history of the Bartons Arms, we spoke to Paul Hook. Paul’s connection with the Bartons Arms started in 2002, when his business Oakham Ales, a brewery founded in Rutland but long since based in Peterborough, first looked into taking on the pub as one of what was eventually five pubs in addition to the brewery.
Paul spoke to us following the January 2024 closure and conceded that while the unique offer of quality Thai dining and Oakham ales, its flagship Citra in particular, proved popular, ‘it was never a great earner, because it’s a big venue in arguably not the best location’. When the pub closed during Covid, with staff placed on furlough, Paul and his partner were presented with a chance to reassess their relationship with the venue. Wanting less commitment to running a Birmingham pub at a distance from their base over an hour and a half drive away in Peterborough, they agreed to lease the pub to the then acting manager and manageress, a Thai couple responsible for the well-regarded Thai dinning offering, and the assistant manager, an Englishman who in effect ran the drinks side of the venue.
This complementary arrangement was short-lived. Paul explained that within a matter of months, following ‘a falling out’, the bar manager had left the Thai couple to run both sides of the business. Although they were from a ‘bright, accounting background’, Paul reflects that perhaps ‘they didn’t realise how much work the English guy was doing in terms of answering the phone, having conversations, dealing with the post’. With the situation quickly becoming unsustainable, things came to a head:
‘They managed to run it for a number of months and then basically did a runner and said really sorry, we’ve packed our bags, we’ve left the country and just left us with a fully working pub. It was clean, tidy, staff didn’t know what was going on. The staff were all paid up to date, but we didn’t know who they were because it wasn’t our business’.
This sudden departure was marked only by an emotional voicemail message from the couple, saying they were leaving, and a CCTV image of a taxi leaving the pub on a Monday evening. Paul was able to verify with the taxi company that the destination of the fare was Birmingham International Airport and, presumably, onwards to a Bangkok bound flight.
Drawn back over from Peterborough, Paul and his partner hastily picked up the pieces and kept the pub functioning. With little operational information left by the abrupt departure of the previous management, Paul had to convene interviews for the staff to deduce the roles and team structure. Still not wanting to manage the daily operations of a large venue from a distance, he passed the pub to a new leaseholder, The Red Pub Company, who at the time ran several venues in Birmingham and the Black Country. Again, though, the unique challenge of the Bartons Arms soon became apparent. Paul reflected that the owner of the Red Pub Company:
‘Really wanted to be an administrator and he wanted to drive in there, make sure the windows were painted and collect the money. He wasn’t really marketing and driving the business as it needed. It was always going to be, because of the location, something that needed extra effort and he didn’t put it in’.
The Red Pub Company tenure at the Bartons Arms lasted less than a year.
A notice of winding up for The Red Pub Company filed at Companies House in March 2024 shows debts running into tens of thousands owned to various utilities firms and food and beverage supplies, Oaka Group (the pub management sister company of Oakham Ales brewery) amongst them. Whilst we choose not to share specific amounts out of a sense of tact for those involved, the publicly available list of debts tells a clear story of the punishing costs involved in heating and a lighting a pub of this age and maintaining a food and drink offering strong enough to draw punters out to an increasingly overlooked corner of Birmingham’s inner suburbs.
At the time of our interview with Paul in July 2024, he was in the middle of negotiations with another leaseholder and was, understandably, unable to confirm the future of the pub. While awaiting firmer news of the reopening plans, we made several visits to Aston to visit the closed pub.
Our walks from the centre of Birmingham out to the Bartons Arms took us from the bustle of the city towards an area with markedly less redevelopment activity. Parts of the wedge of city separating Aston from the city centre feel like an in-between space, with strips of apartments and student accommodation along the canals giving way to warehouses and light industrial units housing various things: a church, an indoor rock climbing facility, various heavy-weight gyms, lots of car parking, and eventually a large postal sorting office.
In early August 2024, we approached the Batons Arms on foot, catching first sight of the pub’s distinctive solidity and ornamentation from some distance as it appeared above a rubbish strewn sliver of scrubland enclosed by the lanes of the A34 dual carriageway. A similar sight no doubt to the one what prompted one prominent beer writer to describe the pub’s location as ‘next to one of Britain’s least appealing roads’ when recounted his visit to the Bartons Arms following its reopening the following month.
At the time of our visit, the pub was clearly closed but not yet encased in steel shutters, fences and hoardings like many of our closed pub cases. Peering through any of the pub’s many windows we could take in much of the famed interior and also spotted the Citra pump clips still adorning the handpulls on the front bar.
While the adjacent road intersection thronged with weekday traffic, the area around the pub was quiet, with few people around. We spoke to a bus driver sat on for her break on the low wall of the rear car park. She knew the pub well and says they used to let bus drivers in to use the toilets. The proprietor of a book shop specialising in black literature across Potters Lane told us that ‘lots of people have had their eye on that place for a long time’. Many felt its eventual conversion to a church or events venue was only a matter of time.
While we’re looking around the exterior of the pub, we strike up a conversation with Rick, an older resident and proud black Brummie with a youthful charm and ready enthusiasm for the pub that make him seem far younger than his 63 years.
Rick told us he had been going to the pub for 40 years and even used to help collect glasses on busy match days in exchange for a few pints on the bar. When we asked Rick what he knew about the pub closing and plans for it to reopen, he told us that he heard the of the previous managers that ‘apparently, they did a runner with the takings’. Several times Rick slipped into detailed descriptions of pubs in the area, long closed or recently converted to steakhouses, take aways or HMOs – the latter he appeared to reserve palpable scorn for. With most of the pubs closed, he now makes a lengthy walk into the city centre when he fancies a pint.
Rick seemed aware of the challenges the pub has faced in recent years, but was grateful that, according to local rumours at the time, someone was stepping in to take it on, adding ‘that’s all we wanted, just our pub back’.
Shortly after our visit, a story appears on Birmingham Live confirming that the pub will reopen, with the new tenants quoted as saying that they are getting the pub reopened quickly ‘for the fans’. Plans to reopen in time for the new football season and Aston Villas opening home game in late August fall through due to an unexpected delay to address water damage to the building. But then, more than eight months after abrupt closure at the start of the year, the Bartons Arms finally opened its doors once again on 31st August 2024.
Amidst the flurry of activity of the opening weeks, we managed to speak with the new licensee. Angela Nelson is hugely experienced in the hospitality trade, having come through the ranks of Mitchell and Butler, the company who originally commissioned the Bartons Arms in 1900 and who she described as ‘a brilliant company’ who ‘change with the times’.
When we meet Angela in October 2024, she immediately acknowledged the challenge facing her and her team:
‘It’s a very expensive site to run, very expensive. The rates are not cheap, all the outgoings and utilities are not cheap. We’ve got to cover a lot of money before we even break even. So, that was the risk for us, is it viable? Can we do that?’
Angela is passionate about pubs and spoke powerfully about the social function of pubs like the Bartons Arms. Even still, our conversation repeatedly oscillated between her optimism and a frank recognition of the many challenging realities facing anyone trying to make a viable going concern of the Bartons Arms, not least the cost of running such a historical building: Angela said that:
‘It’s not for the 21st century, that’s for sure. So, you’re trying to bring the pub into the 21st century while retaining what the pub is, without ruining anything, and just try to make it more cost effective all around, because that was the reason it closed down before and previous to that’.
As an example of the complexity of operating a heritage building as a contemporary business, Angela mentioned that there were different heating systems dating from various periods of the pub’s history, meaning separate areas of the pub draw on different heating systems to supply them.
While we were doing the interview in the large restaurant area at the back of the building, we noticed two middle-aged men with half pints of ale taking photos of some of the historical features. Angela said that every day they get someone coming in wanting to look at the interiors and architecture.
The size of the venue, and its heritage listing, began to feel like a blessing and a curse as she described plans to make more use of the upstairs event room and ‘board room’ and reinstate the history tours focused on the ‘Laurel and Hardy room’, but also reflected that:
‘We probably spent about £25,000 on this before we even moved in here … Anything we do costs three or four times as much. There are so many things that we have to retain in that manner. It’s not just a case of okay, we’ll spend £10,000, throw some paint on the wall. We had to think about every little bit, what we can and can’t do’.
Angela felt that under previous operators a lot of people were unaware of the Thai restaurant side of the offering and instead associated the Bartons Arms with real ale, as ‘a bit of a boozers pub’. Now, having managed to contact one of the previous chefs and two of the service staff (including Tony, a young Thai man and occasional Aston University student who we meet and chat with on several of our visits to the reopened pub), Thai dining appeared to still be part of the plans to make the large venue work financially.
Match day customer from Aston Villa fans, she acknowledged, was crucial. She praised the fans as being:
‘Very mindful, they’re very careful about the building. They love the place. They’re not like football yobs that come here or anything like that… the fans are great. They’re really on board with this, to getting it open again’.
As if to emphasise this link, the recent passing of Gary Shaw, a local born Aston Villa footballer from the 1980s, whose funeral had been held the day before was marked by a portrait behind the bar and a Facebook post from the Bartons Arms account welcoming people to come to the pub ‘in remembrance of his legacy’. A short while after we arrived at the pub, a man, probably in his 60s, arrived holding a small bunch of flowers and sat with a pint in respectful silence under one of several screens playing retro Villa match tapes.
Angela closes our interview with words that in retrospect appear prophetic:
‘If we can’t keep it open then nobody will, because our expertise between us is really good. We’re a great team and the staff are really behind us. They’re very passionate too, because a lot of the staff that have come back to work in here, even the new ones, they understand the passion and how important and special this place is’.
To delve deeper into the long association between the Bartons Arms and Aston Villa, we tapped into a stream of passionate commentary on the Heroes and Villains fan forum. In early 2024 several forum posts about the pub shutting had prompted Villa fans to share their feelings about the closure and, latterly, about plans for the pub to reopen.
Dave Woodhall, a Villa fan and longtime patron of the Bartons Arms told us that he first started drinking at the pub in 2002, around the time the pub came into the ownership of the Oakham group. He recalled the pub being quiet at this time but that once he and his friends ‘got talking and telling other people in the pubs that we drank in how good it was’ it got ‘busier and busier’. Dave remembered that ‘the beer in there was always absolutely top notch’.
For many years, Dave wrote for and edited an Aston Villa fanzine and even recalled hosting a 20th anniversary event for the magazine at the Bartons Arms in 2008, with proceeds of the event contributing to the Aston Villa Fans Trust campaign to commission a statue to club founder, William McGregor, at the ground.
Dave was sombre when he spoke about the fate of the pub. He conceded that ‘in the position it’s in, and the money it must cost to keep it going, it’s a wonder it didn’t close before it did’. He went on to say ‘I hope it survives. I hope all pubs survive because they’re vitally important. Not only connections with the past but also part of the present’.
Speaking about Aston Villa fans, Dave said that ‘a lot of people are now spending pre-match in the city centre and getting a train or taxi to the ground. It had a lot of impact on quite a few people I know because they don’t all go to the same place, so many of them don’t see each other as much anymore’.
This is also something we hear from Frank Pattison, who explained that with the Bartons Arms closed many fans decamped to pubs in the city centre. For Frank and his friends, the Old Joint Stock on Temple Row offered a ready replacement to the Bartons Arms in terms of combining decent real ale, reliable food and elegant architecture, if not benefiting from the same proximity to the ground as the Bartons Arms.
A former boarding school master who had in retirement become something of a node for various groups of Villa fans within the UK and even abroad, Frank welcomed us at the Bartons Arms in late January 2025 ahead of Villa’s Sunday afternoon home match against West Ham (which they would go on to draw 1-1).
Our visit helps Frank demonstrate why the Bartons Arms had become part of his and his friends matchday routine. Booking a large table, he explained, he knows that members of his various fans’ groups relied on the pub as a rallying point to congregate before the game. While the pre-match drink seemed all important, over the years the food offering had meant Thai curries were also a popular part of the match day experience for many.
Through Frank, we met and chat with other Villa fans, who all speak passionately about the pub. Riccardo travels from Italy several times a year to indulge his passion for Aston Villa, British pubs and real ale. We also speak to John, heading to the match with his adult son Joseph, who explained that more than geographical just convenience, ‘we really like the actual building, we just love the history that it has and that’s it connected to, so we were really gutted when it shut’.
As well as Aston Villa fans, the Bartons Arms long relied on real ale drinkers or ‘CAMRA types’ drawn by the reputation for well-kept cask beer and the built heritage. We spoke to someone who embodied both ‘communities’. Tony Buttler, now retired after nearly four decades as a teacher, was born within a couple of miles of Villa Park and although his family then moved across the city to ‘Birmingham City territory’ and he left the city at 18 he has remained a committed Aston Villa fan throughout his life. A fan since 1962 and a season ticket holder since 1997, Tony lives elsewhere in the East Midlands. In the past he attended home games with his son, who has now grown up and moved abroad and first started drinking in the Bartons Arms around 2007, when his son was old enough to legally drink beer before the games.
Speaking at a time when the pub had just reopened, Tony described once again attending the Bartons Arms before home matches, either on his own or on occasions with friends – often supporters of opposition teams. ‘Part of the ritual’ he explained, ‘is to take them to the Bartons Arms’. He explained that:
‘I’ve been delighted that CAMRA’s had such impact on the quality and range of beers that’s available. And that is one thing I look for in a pub, when I go into a pub and I’m weighing it up, if it’s rubbish beer I say, “Let’s go somewhere else” … at Villa, as a season ticketholder, I can go in the Holte Hotel, which is right by the Holte End. The venue’s good, but the beer is limited’.
When The Bartons Arms closed in early 2024, Tony heard the news via an Aston Villa fans forum. He recalled sharing the news with a close friend who often attends games with him: ‘we were both saying, “This is awful.” We were devastated. They can’t close a place like that, surely somebody can come and rescue it?’.
Although Tony, like many, was sad to hear of the closure, he explains he wasn’t surprised given some of the signs that the venue was struggling. He remembered that during the Commonwealth Games in 2022 he visited the pub with his wife and some friends for a bite to eat, but it was quiet. When they returned later in the evening it had closed early. He recalls that ‘even with the Games going on…it had closed for the evening, implying that, okay, it’s going to make money on matchdays but the rest of the week is it just not sustainable’.
As a football fan and pub goer of many years, Tony shares stories of reconvening in the pub after notable matches, such as a 5-5 draw with Nottingham Forest in 2018. He recollects that ‘We all sat down, the whole pub was going, “What have I just seen?”’. He also counted on his hand the rare occasions he’s seen any football fan related conflict at the pub and speaks of the pub being welcoming. ‘Convivial’ is a word he used on several occasions and remembers opposition supporters in the pub – recently speaking with a Bournemouth fan and walking with them to the ground.
Talking with Tony not long after the pub had reopened, he explained: ‘having nearly lost it, I feel even more invested in it now’. When we ask why the pub is important to him and others, he observes that ‘you want an anchor point, don’t you? Yeah, “This is where we’ll meet. This is our home”’.
While our matchday visit found the pub packed with Villa fans drinking and eating ahead of the match, some we spoke to reflected on how even this was a noticeable more modest affair than matchdays of the past. Tony still enjoyed his visits to the Bartons Arms and, at the time of our interview, was glad that it had reopened. However, he also observed that since the reopening the pub was quieter on match days. It was now easier to get served and, he reflected, many fans had found alternative venues for pre-match drinks during the months the pub was closed in 2024.
Matchdays aside, the location of the pub is pivotal to understanding not just its history but its struggles in the present. Paul knows this better than anyone and contrasted the Bartons Arms with large city centre venues where:
‘Even if they’re badly managed, badly run and have iffy products, because of where they are, they’ll be successful, because people just fall through the door. They’ve got high footfall and they can almost do no wrong’.
He went on to say that to make the location of the Bartons Arms work:
‘You’ve got to market it, you’ve got to drive the business, you’ve got spread the word and have a unique offering, or something that makes it a destination venue. So, in the Bartons case, obviously it’s the building, it’s the heritage, it’s the Thai food and it’s the fact that it’s got the space and a nice big function room. I think historically, back into the eighties and nineties, the function room used to take more money than the pub did. So, it’s obviously not an add on. It was really significant.’
Paul observed that the changes taking place over decades had ‘made the Bartons Arms a bit of an island’ in contrast to its original life as ‘a central hub of the sub-community of Aston’. Archive photos show the pub surrounded by businesses, housing and movement – the pub is passed by tram lines, delivery vans, men on bicycles. The clock tower of the pub makes sense in this original context and it’s easy to imagine a glance up from hurried errands or a weary walk home from work, then a thought, ‘time for a pint’.
In these old photos, as in this article from 2019 on the closure of the swimming pool/wellbeing centre, The Drum Arts Centre and Newtown community centre due to government austerity, the pub feels like a real landmark building.
Alluding to these historical photos of the pub in its heyday, Paul noted that:
‘If you look at the old photographs, it had little terraced houses all around it, butting up to it, there were trams outside. Whereas now, they’ve put the expressway outside, which is a large road, dual carriageway in two directions. They’ve made the road junctions so you can’t actually get to the Bartons Arms unless you’re given a map!’.
Aston is still a predominantly working-class neighbourhood, one that has dodged the gentrification that seeped into various areas of Birmingham and other large cities in recent decades.
The demographics of the local area have also changed considerably. Residents of Aston are predominantly of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage. A ‘factsheet’ produced by Birmingham City Council based on 2021 census data shows Aston in the bottom 10% of wards in terms of the index of multiple deprivation and is 92% BME with the two largest ethnic groups being Pakistani (31%) and Bangladeshi (26%).
The fact that a large proportion of local residents are unlikely to drink alcohol or frequent pubs is mentioned often by people we spoke to as we developed the case study. However, the jump from this observation to blaming these communities for the closure of pubs was largely absent, save for a few comments relating to Asian businessmen not valuing pubs enough to see any issue with profiting from their conversion to residential accommodation, take-aways or banqueting venues.
We also observed that while the vast majority of customers at the Bartons Arms on match days were white British, the daytime crowd was distinctly more diverse. The pub was used by a mix of locals. When asked about the locals, Angela acknowledged that although Aston was ‘not the best area in the world, there are some nice people around’. While the Asian communities in Aston do not drink, Angela described a sense of duty to ‘the locals popping in’, adding that ‘people coming in with mental health issues but they’re alright…this is their bar’.
Our interview with Angela ended with a discussion of the social function of a pub like the Bartons Arms. She told us that she sees ‘lots of singles come here, older guys and ladies and they’ve got nobody at home’, adding that ‘you’ve got to be very mindful of that too. You can’t just disregard people because every penny that comes in that till is valued’.
To understand the recent travails of the Bartons Arms it is necessary to contextualise the pub in the recent development of pubs and bars in and around Birmingham. Motivated in no small part by our curiosity as pub goers, but also our desire for our case studies to be contextualised beyond a narrow focus on the viability of a specific venue, our walks invariably included planned or spontaneous visits to other pubs within the arc of the city between Jewellery Quarter, Gunmakers Quarter and Aston up to the Bartons Arms. Across this area, a sweep of city changing quickly but inconsistently, there are plenty of little pockets of Old Birmingham amidst much new development in terms of apartments, student accommodation, office buildings going up.
The walk out to the pub from the city takes you through a patchwork of development zones and, equally telling, areas of stasis and neglect. The Aston University campus was busy with the relaxed chatter of staff and students, its two pubs – The Sack o’ Potatoes and the Gosta Green – seemingly more alive than the Bartons Arms with the former serving lunches to staff drawn from the university and adjacent science park offices and the latter using the Summer months to make a major refurbishment in anticipation of another cohort of students arriving in the Autumn.
From Aston University campus, a ten minute walk – depending on how quickly you can navigate the crossings and underpasses of the Aston Expressway that cuts unapologetically through this part of the city – brings you into the Gunmakers Quarter, and to another historical pub, albeit on a less grand scale than the Bartons Arms. The Bull feels ‘very CAMRA’, there are copies of the Good Beer Guide lining the shelves and award certificates for Pub of the Year type things behind the bar. Large exterior signs explain the role of pubs in the area’s industrial heritage and recounts wages paid in pubs, and payday binges that led predictably to exuberance tipping regularly into outright disorder.
In The Bull, we struck up conversation with bar manager Vanessa. She refers to Bob the older regular sit with his pint. Bob comes in at noon every day, she explained, ‘sometimes he chats, often he just sits’. She referred to social contact for older regulars a lot, and suggested that with area developing so fast they are left without many places to go. When we talk about our case study, she sets out her understanding of why pubs like the Bartons Arms are struggling: utilities costs but also the cost of living meaning a regular pub outing is beyond the means of many. Daytime customers are important, but ‘you need more’.
Something else that becomes apparent when exploring Birmingham is that while many pubs close or struggle, there are plenty of examples of new or recent openings that ether give some degree of hope or indicate how shifts in tastes and practices of resident and visiting drinkers are reshaping the pub scene in the city.
A literal stone throw from the Bartons Arms is Silhill Brewery, a brewery and taproom which moved to Aston in November 2023 having occupied premises in Solihull previously. In August 2024 we spoke to Mark the owner and brewer, who showed us around the new taproom, where a Sun ‘Geni’ scooter – a 1950s model his great grandfather owned and operated the Sun factory that was in Aston ’50-100 meters that way’ – sat parked amidst beer bottles and hop sacks. Mark spoke of pride that the brewery was bringing some manufacturing back to Aston. Given the location, Mark was also clear that matchday crowds were a big part of his business model – and we would later hear from the Villa Fans we spoke to that a number had opted for the taproom during the Bartons Arms closure and stayed there since.
Leaving Aston behind and walking back towards central Birmingham, we find our way to The Woodman, a pub which perhaps presents the most interesting comparison to the Bartons Arms. Built three years earlier than the Bartons Arms and by the same architects, The Woodman can be seen as a sister pub to the Bartons Arms. Described in a Google Maps review as ‘Lovely old survivor hanging on in redevelopment area’, it offers a similar uncompromising solidity of Victorian pubs furnished in wood and glass praised by George Orwell in his famous and much-cited essay. Situated right next to the HS2 development and with Birmingham City University, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, the Millennium Point events venue, a science museum and Moor Street and New Street stations all walkable from the pub, it feels closer to the vital parts of the city than any licensee of the Bartons Arms could dream of.
The Woodman was recently bought, refurbished and reopened by John Brearly. The pub came to his attention at a time when it had been running to a mainly student clientele, but finally closed in 2022 primarily struggling with the huge works taking place around the Curzon street area which made the pub ‘almost physically impossible to get to’. Having worked for years in senior financial roles in the pub sector, he now has his ‘portfolio’ or projects and hobbies, which includes The Woodman as the third pub he has ‘saved’. The Woodman is not, like some other ‘saved’ pubs with benevolent owners who can, in his words, ‘just chuck five-million quid to buy a pub’ as a form of ‘vanity projects’. He spoke of a sense of custodianship rooted both in his love of pubs and pub heritage but also what he recognised as his vast experience in the sector.
John spoke of his two greatest passions being pubs and people. Concerning the latter, he reflected how he’s always loved making new connections and bringing people together. This is a key feature of a well-run pub but also, in the case of the revival of The Woodman, manifest in his ability to garner the support of influential people including the leader of Birmingham City Council, the Head of Stations from the High Speed 2 development company and even a former Birmingham City Football club captain. He even mentioned the Major of Birmingham pulling pints at the pub’s re-opening night.
When asked about the Bartons Arms, John confesses ‘I could just cry because it’s such a beautiful pub’ but ‘it’s a bugger of a place to get to’ and ‘needs money spending on – I’m sure it’s got all sorts of problems with its roof or whatever, you know, it would just be an absolute money pit that’. Compared the £100,000 cost of his pub refurbishment in Wigan, John estimated that the Bartons Arms could require that much ‘times five’, so £500,000 to bring it up to up to standard. Given the challenges of the location, ‘who would be willing to invest such a sum?’.
John clearly hopes his investment in the pub, and his cultivation of his passion in others, will give The Woodman the long term viability the Bartons Arms sorely lacks. To give a sense of the timeframe he is working with John reassured us that with ‘a new lease with Birmingham City Council, a twenty-five-year lease … we’ve got absolute security’. This would take The Woodman up to and significantly beyond the planned 2030 opening of the HS2 terminal on Curzon Street which, we all assume, will supply the pub with a ready flow of both regulars and passing custom.
The fate of a pub with a history as long and as rich as the Bartons Arms inevitably foregrounds questions of heritage. We also see how community and identity are lenses to make sense of the connection of pub, people and place.
Over years, the Bartons Arms was woven through many people’s understanding of Aston, and Birmingham, as a particular kind of place. We tend to think of pubs as fixed in space, but the space in which they are set is dynamic and evolving. Part of the task of telling the story of the Bartons Arms is to understand the city’s shifting centre of gravity; the relations between centre and periphery and the ways in which people’s orbits around work, home and leisure shift and adjust over time.
During the time we spent looking at the Bartons Arms for this case study, we spoke to people who in various ways articulated the same feeling that a particular pub can link people to place, even when the lives they lead mean they no longer have any other connection to the area. The grandeur of the Bartons Arms architecture and furnishing symbolise something else also, solidity and attachment.
For a few months through late 2024 into 2025, before the burdens of running such a historic building became overwhelming, the Bartons Arms once again provided a convivial space for communities of various sorts – Aston Villa fans but also others, older and more vulnerable daytime drinkers whose quiet pint might have been accompanied by one of the few moments of social connection in an otherwise isolated life.