The closure of the Litten Tree in Coventry in early 2023 ended nearly 25 years of service as a generally uncelebrated city centre pub. The pub originally opened with much fanfare in 1999, one of a wider chain of Litten Tree ‘chameleon venues’, offering discounted drinks and meals during the daytime then morphing into something akin to a nightclub at night. However, by its final years the pub was relying on a diminishing cast of ‘familiar faces’. The pub’s manager at the time of its closure described the Litten Tree as ‘an old-fashioned sort of boozer’, a place where ‘you’d get your general sort of day drinkers who would be in there probably five, six days a week, religiously’ – the likes of ‘Carling Rob’ and ‘Strongbow Norman’ who knew what, where and when they liked to drink.
The outer appearance of the Litten Tree seems typical of the decaying and largely unloved post-war architecture which still dominates large parts of Coventry city centre. But the present state hides a more illustrious past. The building started life in 1911 as a showroom attached to Rover’s sprawling Meteor works which first produced bicycles, then the cars for which Coventry’s reputation as the epicentre of British car manufacturing was derived. The addition of a prestige showroom on the up-market Warwick Row, to the south of the factory, gave Rover a suitable space in which aspiring consumers could receive delivery with suitable pomp and ceremony. An image marking the Coronation of George V in 1911 shows the ‘Lady Godiva Procession’ passing a ornate building, adorned with drapes, gilding and a union jack fluttering from a prominent flagpole.
Inside the building, there was also a sense of grandeur and progress. A giant lift used to transport cars from the factory floor to the various levels of the showroom used technology imported from Manhattan. This unique feature was later covered over, only to be rediscovered in 2021 when the upper floors of the building were being prepared for its final incarnation as a community arts space.
The car showroom operated until 1934, when Rover moved to new premises elsewhere in the city. But the building soon found a new purpose. Built using a concrete beam construction still uncommon at the time, it was one of the few buildings in Coventry considered blast proof. With the onset of the Second World War, the building came under the stewardship of the city council and spent the late 1930s and early 1940s housing various civic departments. It was here that the design office for Donald Gibson and his team plotted the rebuilding of the city centre levelled by the devastating Luftwaffe raids of November 1940.
By the 1950s, with Coventry entering its golden age as a hub of manufacturing, a new sense of optimism emerged. 1954 saw local architecture firm Hellbourg Harris oversee the remodelling of the building with the now familiar red brick frontage and projecting first floor windows as the building became Foulkes Kitchen Showrooms. Over the following years, the building was occupied by first a discount clothing business then a fabric retailer, who took the questionable step of filling in the first floor windows of what was, for a time, a restaurant. In 1979 the building became Intershop, a cluster of 20 shops under one roof, novel at the time but now recognisable as a forerunner to the department stores that came to dominate city centre retail in the second half of the twentieth century. Interestingly, it is Intershop that elicits the most nostalgia across social media commentaries about the final closure of the Litten Tree pub, as comments sections became a place to share childhood memories of shopping for new school shoes and Panini football sticker albums.
It was only in 1999 that the building finally became a pub. The Litten Tree chain chose the site for its first midlands base for its newly fashionable ‘chameleon venue’ concept. By day, a promotion-led drinks and food offering aimed to appeal to a broad range of customers, including the city’s expanding student population. By night, with tables moved back, a high-end sound system and lighting rig morphing the atmosphere of the venue into something akin to a nightclub. The opening was heralded as an ‘exciting addition to the city’s leisure economy’ and ‘a vote of confidence for Coventry’. These are sentiments that stand in contrast to the reputation of the pub during its final years and the general sense of neglect palpable in an area of the city awaiting demolition and redevelopment. At the time, however, both the newly opened Litten Tree pub and its rapidly expanding operator typified an era in which post-industrial cities such as Coventry were to be ‘reimagined’ as places of play and pleasure. The consumerism of daytime retail was to be complemented by evenings devoted to indulgence in what became known to academics and town planners alike as the ‘Night Time Economy’.
The operators of the Litten Tree chain were established as Surrey Free Inns Plc in 1984. The company rapidly built a portfolio of pubs, principally around London and the ‘metro-land’ of commuter belt suburbs and towns of the Southeast. Their initial estate comprised traditional wet-led pubs reliant on regular trade from their local residential area. But the evolution of the company from here was rapid and typifies several key developments in the pub and brewery sector at this time. At a time when most British pubs tied to an estate belonged to one of the dominant ‘Big Six’ breweries, a company buying up pubs without any history of brewing its own beer was unusual. This was a novelty that foreshadowed the 1989 Beer Orders and its impact in the formation of the PubCos, corporate entities with no active brewing solely focused on managing an often sizable estate of venues. The 1990s saw the sector shaken up. Rebadged as SFI Group following a listing on the London Stock Exchange, the company would at its peak operate over 200 venues and employ 3000 staff across a ‘portfolio’ of ‘brands’ including 58 Litten Trees alongside Slug and Lettuce, Club Med and the lap dancing chain For Your Eyes Only.
This corporate expansion would not last. The sudden closure of the Coventry Litten Tree in 2002 forewarned the precipitous collapse of SFI Group in 2003, when ‘financial irregularities’ were exposed. Having spent a brief few years at the forefront of the burgeoning Coventry Night Time Economy, the unit on Warwick Row stood empty between 2002 and 2007.
After the collapse of SFI Group, The Litten Tree stood empty for four years. It reopened in 2007 under the management. Richard recalls that it was over a working lunch bought from a catering van on the adjacent Bull Yard that the decision to take on the pub took root. He and a colleague were ‘sat having a jacket potato and we saw the “To Let” sign above the Litten Tree and thought shall we give that a go’. On a whim, he enquired about the terms of the lease and was told that the building was in line for redevelopment, having ‘sat empty’ with ‘the internals… mothballed’. With an uncertain future but a cheap rent, Richard signed a short term lease. As Richard explained, at the time he took on the Litten Tree it had ‘a certain reputation of perhaps not being the nicest venue in Coventry’. Richard’s previous experience of running pubs was at this point limited to The Lion, a traditional pub in the nearby Warwickshire town of Kenilworth. Securing a large urban pub ‘was a big challenge to get going’. He explained that:
‘It’s got a huge kitchen. It’s got a huge downstairs area. So, to come up with an idea to actually fill that downstairs area in a way that the kitchen paid for itself was quite a challenge, and that’s why we led our thoughts towards a discount model. So going for the two meals for £6.95, I think it was at the time, just to get the volume in there and to pretty much go for a Wetherspoon’s, chain pub approach to it.’
The Litten Tree name, by then out of trademark after the ignominious collapse of SFI Group, was kept. This reflected Richard’s desire for the pub to still be perceived as a chain pub capable of promising the best deals on drinks and food. It also saved the cost of replacing the copious signage on a pub which was, at the time, still intended to be a short term project.
Out of necessity, the Litten Tree’s original chameleonic model was retained. Day time was for the ‘old boys’, men of a certain age who, Richard remembers, ‘come in and socialise in the daytime, they were our first customers …. through the door at 7.00am’. The early licence also enticed people still ‘out’ from the previous night looking to keep their binge going, and night crews coming off the tracks at the nearby Coventry railway station. From late morning onwards, a mixed crowd of shoppers, pensioners and office workers came in for affordable meals and drinks. Evenings, Richard explains, were ‘like every other venue in the city centre, that was predominantly people that were travelling into the city centre for a night out’. Fridays and Saturdays were busiest, but weeknight events targeting students from the two local universities could also fill the venue, requiring a large team of bar staff and several bouncers on the door.
The reputation for rowdiness acquired during its SFI Group days was hard to shift. Particularly so when the Litten Tree became the closest pub to the railway station following the closure of The Rocket in 2011. The Litten Tree was now first port of call for crowds of football fans, the city’s team then already enduring a chaotic slide into the lower tiers of English football. Then in 2016, the location would inflict the reputation of the pub a further blow when the far-right group the English Defence League used the pub as a mustering point for a disorderly march on the city centre. The reaction involved a campaign to boycott the pub which, Richard recalls, was ‘hard to come back from’ for a venue that already marked by its reputation as a no-frills, often rough, all-day drinking space known for disorder.
When we spoke to Kieran, who managed the Litten Tree for Richard and still runs their two remaining venues in the city, he is candid about the challenges they faced:
‘Early days it was very challenging. I don’t think there was ever a day where there wasn’t some sort of drunken incident of some sort. And it took a few years to sort of slowly change that mentality, but the problem is as soon as a place has a reputation, it’s very hard to shake that. You know, you can gain a reputation overnight, but to try and get rid of that reputation, I don’t think we ever did’.
Given these issues it is ironic that Richard and Kieran added to their workload by opening another venue adjacent to the Litten Tree in 2017. Formally The Glass House, The Yard took its name from the Bull Yard which separated the two venues. It was another opportunistic acquisition, signed on a short term lease with discounted rates given the uncertainty around the planned redevelopment of the area. Kieran laughs when he recalls how the two operations were ‘bipolar opposites’. The Litten Tree was an ‘old-fashioned boozer’ known for a troublesome crowd requiring the watchful presence of the pubs security team. The Yard, however, became an LGBT+ friendly bar and entertainment space, only the second gay venue in the city. Surprisingly, both Richard and Kieran describe a degree of overspill between the two venues, not least on sunny afternoons when Litten Tree punters moved across to The Yard’s more spacious outdoor seating area on the Bull Yard itself.
Like many pubs in our study, Covid was a time when a venue like the Litten Tree, already beset by multiple challenges, began a decline that eventually led to its closure. A large venue but with limited outdoor space, it struggled to ride out the Covid period, particularly during the fragmented return to ‘normality’. Richard explained that many old regulars failed to reappear after Covid. Discounting the younger clientele of Friday and Saturday nights, the regulars were an older crowd, in their 50s, 60s and 70s – those hardest hit by Covid. While The Yard opposite could make more use of its paved outdoor area in keeping with social distancing rules, the Litten Tree struggled to revive its volume sales ethos. Richard admits that ‘it never pulled it back after that’.
When the council informed him that the new terms of the lease would only be renewed on an annual basis, as the long-rumoured plans for redevelopment once again took shape, Richard decided it was time to vacate and the Litten Tree finally closed at the start of 2023. The Yard would cling on until April 2024. This was a time which Richard recalls as ‘awful for us, because everywhere else is closing down and you’re stuck there as a business in the middle of a derelict block of units’.
Having shuttered two pubs in a little over a year, new opportunities soon emerged. A chance encounter with a former customer led to The Yard moving across the city to an striking and well-known purpose built hospitality venue close to the university, the city council buildings and The Herbert Art Gallery. Speaking to us at this new site, Kieran feels they ‘hit the jackpot’ and spoke of feeling relieved to welcome ‘customers back here, happy, busier than ever’. Things are less certain for The Squirrel, a pub which Richard was negotiating a lease on following the closure of the Litten Tree and went ahead with despite the new site for The Yard becoming available. 300 meters away from the Litten Tree but, importantly, falling outside of the redevelopment zone, they hope that The Squirrel can get by given its proximity to first builders and trades people working on the redevelopment work, then from the newly built residential units which it could become the de factor local for. In the meantime, after some attempts with a ‘pub classics’ menu, Richard has opted to sub-let the kitchens and dining area of The Squirrel which are now being run as a curry house.
The Squirrel on Greyfriars Lane and sign for Spicy Squirrel restaurant located on upper floor
As trade at the Litten Tree struggled on through these final years, a new chapter in the building’s history was already being added. Local resident Alan Denyer took up an offer to open the upper floors of the Litten Tree building as a temporary gallery and cultural space in the summer of 2021 while the pub was still operating across the ground floor. Having undertaken a similar initiative when briefly occupying parts of the old Coventry Telegraph building, then awaiting renovation as an upmarket hotel, Alan got to work opening the rooms above the pub previously used as storage and staff accommodation. Cleared out and repainted, and with a roost of pigeons evicted from the void between the roof and the decaying lath and plaster ceiling of the uppermost floor, Alan christened the space the LTB Showrooms. This name refenced both the original Rover car showrooms and the more recent incarnation of the building as the Litten Tree pub.
It was during these preparations that many of the features of the building’s previous uses came to light. The gearing of the immense car lift, boxed in and forgotten when the lift shaft was converted into a stairwell during its use as a retail space were revealed. The distinct shadings of carpeting marking out the pathways across the floorplan of the Intershop ‘departments’ were retained.
The gallery spaces above soon attracted a loyal following to a series of successful exhibitions and events. The building was now hosting a noticeably different demographic than the established, if diminished, group of regulars patronising the pub still operating below. A makeshift bar was constructed in the gallery space, allowing staff from the pub to serve to the arty crowds attending exhibition launches and spoken word poetry events upstairs. At first, Alan explains, these alcohol sales were a ‘thank you’ to the pub for providing LTB Showrooms a rent free space to operate in. LTB Showrooms welcomed nearly 15,000 visitors to over 150 events between the summer of 2021 and the closure of the Litten Tree pub in February 2023. With the closure of the pub, LTB Showrooms was forced to temporarily vacate, before being allowed back into the building in May that year with help from Coventry City Council.
After the pub closed in 2023, Alan became what he describes as an ‘accidental landlord’. He passed his personal licence holder course which allowed LTB Showrooms to keep the Litten Tree’s 7am to 2am license. Unincumbered by the messy network of lines, pumps, taps and kegs which had been ripped out of the bar when the Litten Tree closed, Alan was surprised by the ease with which alcohol sales became part of both the viability of the venue. Alcohol sales were soon brining in £60,000 annually, enough to cover the utilities bills and the security required as a condition of operating the evening license. Something Alan had set up as ‘a bit of fun’ and ‘something that I was doing in my spare time’ quickly became a viable fixture in the Coventry nightlife space.
Speaking to Alan in October 2024, ahead of the closure of LTB Showrooms at the start of 2025, he was honest about the dynamics that made the space viable. Having started out reliant on the goodwill of the pub management in providing access to the then unused upper floors, the looming presence of the planned, yet often delayed, urban redeveloped meant that Coventry City Council were keen to keep the building occupied. LTB Showrooms was a space that continued some of the vibrancy that had swept through the city during its tenure as the City of Culture in 2021. Alan accepted that being registered as a charity allowed him to benefit from ‘quite a healthy situation’ whereby unoccupied buildings can reduce their liability for business rates by 80% or more by turning the space over to a local charity or community initiative.
At the time of writing, the Litten Tree building awaits demolition along with the arcades of the shopping precinct, multi-storey car park and a swathe of retail units and office blocks encircling Coventry’s distinctive circular covered market. Meeting someone related to the redevelopment project (who has asked to remain anonymous), we talk about the plans whilst pacing a rough outline of the redevelopment boundary: from the Bull Yard, past the Litten Tree then down Greyfriars Road to the back of the now closed City Arcade, overlooked by the towering blue and yellow of the now empty IKEA building.
We walk up the City Arcade, at this point still accessible ahead of the construction of the 8 ft high hoardings that encircled the redevelopment site in the Autumn of 2024. Towards the end of the arcade of closed and shuttered units we stop to view a hole in the ceiling, 10 meters above our heads. Our guide describes how a teenage girl had recently fallen through having broken into a storage shed on the roof of the building. She might not have survived had the canvas awning of a shopfront beneath not cushioned her fall onto the tiled floor of the derelict shopping centre below.
It’s a sombre tone in contrast to his animated account of the scale and ambition of the Coventry City Centre South redevelopment, a scheme that he says will keep Hill Group in the city for a decade. As we walk back to the small unit on Hertford Street used by Hill Group as their site office, he points to where Phase One will be, where Block A will rise. Block B will be a ‘monster block’, he says. B1 and B2 are planned as affordable housing, B3 and B4 will be ‘build-to-rent’ and B5 as private sale. The mock up images of the area that adorn the website and plaster the frontage of the look strikingly familiar and depressingly generic. The distinctive post-war urban style which everyone we talk to agrees feels unloved but is ‘very Coventry’ will be replaced with the smooth surfaces and neat geometric angles of apartment blocks familiar to city dwellers anywhere in Europe or beyond.
Nevertheless, he talks of Hill Group having ‘an obligation’ to be respectful of the city and its history. There was ‘a big push on public art from the council when we were in the planning stage’ focusing on the ongoing attempts to relocate several pieces of public art by the sculptor William Mitchell, including the murals that cover the front of the Three Tuns pub on the Bull Yard, and a ‘History of Coventry’ mural found under plaster in the lobby of a vacated office on Hertford Street. Although the two local universities and the Herbert Gallery had been approached, the cost of a tricky removal and storage of the lengthy but thin concrete murals deters them, meaning the future of the murals remains unclear, despite our guide’s allusions to a possible site as part of a visitor information structure planned near the end of the development.
Despite this evident interest in preserving something of the character of the area, he is quick to acknowledges that Hill Group aim to make a significant financial return, both from this development and from the associated sites around the city they and their partners have interests in. Initially, the tender had been won by a different company more focused on major retail and commercial developments. However, Hill Group were brought in as the project pivoted further and further towards residential as the value of commercial real estate plummeted during Covid and its aftermath. The final plan now involves residential units and only a scattering of commercial and retail units at street level.
He explains that the anticipated draw of the residential units will be the proximity to the station and quick trains to Birmingham and even London. The Litten Tree building will be demolished and replaced by several blocks of apartments with undercroft parking and a ‘top quality’ ground floor commercial space. Plans show the site of the current Bull Yard as open space.
Pre-empting a question to which we already sense the answer, he says there’s little chance of any of the existing businesses returning to the site:
‘We have got a mix of clothes retailers, you know, express supermarkets to a gallery was proposed in one bit, you know, a small one. But we’re not looking to stuff it full of Zara’s or Tesco’s or Pizza Hut’s or any one thing specifically, it is like a curated approach to the whole commercial offer’.
The idea of the businesses displaced by the redevelopment – the ‘Award Winning family butchers, the student fixture Noodle Bar, or the currently homeless Heat strip club or indeed, a low market end pub like the Litten Tree – returning feels laughable given the high rents such a property will command after the extensive redevelopment. In any case, most of the empty retail units we walk past have notices in the windows, some printed but many hand written, referring returning customers to ‘new premises’ in other parts of the city centre. There’s no shortage of retail space given the city’s low occupancy rates. Even in the most central locations, such as the Cathedral Lanes, site of the sudden closure of national chains Bistrot Pierre and The Botanist in the opening months of 2025, units of various sizes stand empty.
When we talk about the closure of pubs, it is perhaps natural to gravitate to a focus on their materiality. Given their long presence in the built environment many pubs become reference points to locals and visitors. Far more would be familiar with the Litten Tree from passing it on their way to or from the train station than they would as actual customers. But we also want to know about the people affected by the closure of pubs.
Through Richard and Kieran, and a post on the Coventry Pubs Facebook page, we track down and speak to some of the staff who worked at the Litten Tree over the years. We heard time and again how working at the Litten Tree was not a job for the fainthearted, particularly during its first incarnation as an outpost of a rapidly expanding PubCo chain ‘brand’. We also get a sense of how the pub trade in all its incarnations is about people and how working there meant learning how to deal with ‘all sorts’ in a venue where ‘anyone could walk in’, eccentric, volatile or lonely.
Is the closure of the Litten Tree mourned? What loss is a single pub in a city the side of Coventry? On a visit to a Campaign for Real Ale branch committee meeting, sitting in the Old Windmill, Coventry’s oldest pub, I ask about how people about the situation of pubs in the city. One branch member gives a one-word answer: ‘diabolical’.
We later speak to Graham Paine, a stalwart of the Coventry and Warwickshire CAMRA branch and the editor and lead writer of its branch magazine Pint Sides. He reflects that ‘Coventry has a much higher percentage of pubco pubs, and a much smaller percentage of free houses than places like for instance Derby, Sheffield and Norwich’. He says that ‘there’s no doubt that PubCos do have a detrimental effect, in terms of pricing and the overall effect’. Operations of the PubCos aside, Graham went on to suggest that ‘Coventry city centre is really not fit for purpose for a city of its size and standing’, noting that ‘an awful lot of people I know who live in Coventry who just do not go in the city centre, because there’s nothing really for them’.
Are there any rays of light in Coventry for pub aficionados like Graham? He and several others we speak to locally about the Litten Tree and pub closures more generally, mention Hops D’Amour, a micropub that Graham asserts has ‘added a huge amount to the beer offering in Coventry, which we’ve never had before’. This is a big statement for what is a modest single room micropub occupying a former Singer sewing machine shop on the lower end of Corporation Street, near Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre and surrounded by restaurants, takeaways and student accommodation blocks.
Vyx, the owner of Hops D’Amour, described opening the city’s first micropub as ‘nerve-wracking’, saying that ‘in the beginning, obviously there was nothing to compare it to. There’s not another micropub, there’s lots of really lovely sort of traditional pubs, but nothing as small as this, nothing quite like this at the time’.
The modest size of its venue quickly turned into its strength. She explained that when they opened right after Covid, there were:
‘…a lot of very, very lonely people. I think a micropub worked really well straight after Covid because we were all so used to staying away from each other, and a lot of people were too scared to have a conversation with somebody. So, I think having a small intimate space where you could sit and interact and make new friends, because, yeah, a lot of people had sort of lost their family group, their friend groups, so it was nice to have somewhere to reconnect with people, like new people and friends from before’.
She makes use of social media, not just sharing regular updates on their beer board, but by maintaining interaction with customers. Hops D’Amour is known as a ticker’s paradise, given their track record securing more obscure sessional brews from a changing roster of microbreweries. She’s humble when we tell her that her pub has been mentioned numerous times as we’ve tried to seek out some positive news about Coventry’s beer scene. In a similar vein to Graham, she does acknowledge that ‘Coventry pubs have not progressed as much as other cities and other towns’.
As we talk, sat beneath the pump clips, posters and paintings adorning every inch of the pub’s interior walls, Vyx watches the door attentively. On several occasions she springs up to open the door as one of her regulars approaches, greeting each by name as they shuffle in, order beers and take their seats either alone or joining in one of several hushed conversations.
The story of the Litten Tree tells us much about the changing fortunes of the pub sector, but also wider trends in how cities are changing as spaces to live, work, shop and play.
There is a strange mix of permanence and transience this story. To some extent, it’s a repeat of problems experienced in larger towns and smaller cities around the country as councils try to marshal economic resources and social, cultural and emotional energy.
Coventry has long stuck out as an experimental space in terms of urban redevelopment. Across its 114 year life, the Litten Tree building has repeatedly been repurposed and reused. From grandiose car showroom to budget department store – and, finally, a celebrated then somewhat down at heel ‘boozer’, eventually joined somewhat incongruously by a pop-up arts space. We first approached the Litten Tree wanting to tell the story of its closure, but found that its whole life was as facinating and important as its eventual end.
