‘It’s every village in North Herts with a nice village green and a pretty area that is in danger. They are all under the same attack as we are now.’
– Chair of residents’ meeting against proposed redevelopment of the Red Lion pub, August 1981.
In 1982, The Red Lion in Preston, North Hertfordshire became the UK’s first community-owned pub. 92 households raised £92,000 to complete the purchase from Whitbred Brewery, fighting off an alternative proposal to turn it into a ‘large steakhouse-style restaurant’. For decades the Red Lion was something of an anomaly, with only two further community owned pubs coming into being before 2000. But driven by local groups fighting pub closure, recent years have seen community-ownership becoming a growing trend. According to CAMRA there are now 217 community-pubs operating across Britain, with 78 active campaigns.
A few miles down the road, in the village of Kimpton, the Save Our White Horse (SOWH) campaign hopes to make The White Horse pub the latest example of a successful community ownership campaign in North Herts. The red brick Grade II listed pub – parts of which date back to the 18th century – has sat empty and in an increasingly dilapidated condition after closing in 2014 and sold by McMullens Brewery to a housing developer. Since then, campaigners have defeated three separate planning applications to convert the pub into residential accommodation from two different owners. The latest application was rejected in June 2025. Yet, efforts to bring the pub into community ownership have so far been unsuccessful. They now have the hard-won distinction of being the longest ongoing community-ownership campaign in the country.
As the only pub among our seven case studies with an active community-ownership campaign, we were interested in the White Horse as a non-recent closure which remains a live concern for the village. How is it that, 11 years after closing, the pub remains unoccupied? How have the campaigners managed to sustain their commitment to their campaign over this long period of time? And what does this case study tell us about the growing trend towards community-owned pubs and the challenges they face?
Of added interest in this case is the fact that The White Horse was not the sole remaining pub in the village of Kimpton. A larger pub, The Boot, continues to trade about 300 metres along the High Street. Why, then, have the campaigners persisted for so long with their attempt to save the White Horse?
The White Horse ceased trading in 2014. But the beginning of the end is perhaps more accurately dated as 2013, when the landlady of 21 years – Janet Johnson – left the pub. Many Kimpton residents recalled fond memories of the pub from its time under the stewardship of Janet and her late husband Peter. Cherry, a resident since 1998, freelance journalist and member of the SOWH committee, told us about the homecooked food and welcoming atmosphere, the cosy fire, wooden beams and the various local groups and clubs that would meet there – all of which made the space feel ‘very community focused’. The bar, positioned immediately facing the main entrance, was a sociable space. But the pub also had ‘cosy corners’ where one could easily enjoy a quiet drink undisturbed, owing to it having been stitched together in 1989 from three separate properties, combining a smaller pub (licensed since 1872) with a next-door cottage and shop unit.
Folk music sessions would regularly take place at the pub which provided the genesis of the highly successful Kimpton Folk Festival, as would another singing group called ‘unplugged’ which would sing ‘rocky type songs’. Cherry was a member of the latter group and said that these nights could be ‘really quite raucous’. They offered a chance for local people to have fun and get to know each other. Cherry recalls bringing her elderly mother along to one event and her getting involved by ‘tapping a tambourine’.
Janet and Peter were very involved in the life of the village. They were central to the revival of the Kimpton May Day Festival and had a keen sense of fun, putting together an all-male majorettes group, ‘The White Horse Male Majorettes’, to perform on the day. They also raised money for charitable causes, including the local school and the children’s ward at a nearby hospital. In 1999 they raised £12,500, a key factor in them winning that year’s Brewers and Licensed Retailers’ ‘East of England Community Pub of the Year’ award. The White Horse was thus a ‘community pub’ before there was any attempt to turn it into a ‘community-owned pub’. And it is this pre-existing organic relationship between the White Horse and the civic life of the village which underpins the SOWH campaign.
The quality of the pub offering noticeably declined after Janet left in 2013. Neil, a Kimpton resident since 1984 and chair of SOWH between 2016 and 2020, explained that the pub ‘went from having a landlord every 20 years, to have three landlords in the space of two years’. These new landlords might have had ‘good intent’ but, for Neil, they ‘didn’t actually know how to run a pub or understand what the clientele might want’.
There was also confusion about opening times. As Cherry put it: ‘They only seemed to be open a couple of nights a week and nobody could understand what was happening.’ And when the pub was open, you couldn’t be sure of a friendly greeting. Another resident described how she had gone into the pub with a friend to find the landlord sitting at a table in front of his laptop. ‘He didn’t bat an eyelid’, she complained – his lack of greeting falling far short of what she expected from her local.
Was putting a lower calibre of landlord into the pub part of a deliberate strategy on the part of the brewery to ‘run down’ the pub, thereby easing the way for redevelopment? Multiple residents that we spoke to thought so – a suspicion common to one of our other pub closure case studies. Indeed, the ‘viability’ of the pub has become crucial within contestation around the future of The White Horse.
The first move in this long and convoluted story was a planning application submitted by the property developer Haut LTD in 2015 to convert the pub into a residential property. This argued that the pub was no longer viable, citing barrelage data provided by McMullen’s. The planning officer recommended the application be approved on the grounds that this was a pub in ‘steady decline’ and that, due to the presence of another pub in the village, its closure would not ‘be significantly harmful to the provision of community facilities’.
But after hearing testimony from residents, the planning committee voted to reject the planning permission, against the recommendation of the planning officer. As Cherry describes it:
‘I stood up and put the point across. You know, you’ve got literally three minutes to explain why planning shouldn’t be given to make it into a house and then the buzzer goes. And we succeeded in turning nearly everybody on the council. We just said no because it’s valued, it’s wanted.’
That the pub was valued by residents is something we’ve heard in several of our case studies. All too often residents feel their views aren’t considered by what they perceive as dispassionate planners and avaricious developers.
At around the same time as the planning meeting, Kimpton residents succeeded in getting The White Horse listed as an ‘Asset of Community Value’ (ACV) with North Herts District Council. Introduced as part of the 2011 Localism Act, this gives community groups the power to register their interest to buy an ACV, placing a 6-month moratorium on its sale to another party. Alongside packages of financial and technical support from central government and third-sector organisations such as Plunkett UK, this legislation is part of the reason for the dramatic increase in pub community ownership in recent years – although as we shall see, by no means guarantees that community ownership bids will succeed.
In 2017, having had planning permission rejected, the property developer put the pub back on the market, seemingly paving the way for the community to buy it. However, after submitting a fully funded bid, above market value, of £380,000 the community-ownership campaign found themselves outbid and, once again, having to contend with a new private owner with their own plans for the site.
The new owner – Ross Tomlinson via his small IT Company- assured the campaigners that he intended to reopen The White Horse as a pub. However, he argued that major work would need to be undertaken on the pub to make it ‘viable’. His initial idea was to extend the pub, installing an area for ‘fine dining’ accommodating 50 covers at the rear and building a car park on a farmer’s field on the other side of the road. (A plan with uncanny similarities with the 1982 proposal – mentioned above – to turn the Red Lion pub into a steakhouse.)
When Tomlinson’s proposal received negative initial feedback from North Herts Distinct Council he pivoted to a different idea. In 2021, four years on from having bought the pub, a proposal was submitted which would subdivide the site into a private residence, first floor office space and a smaller ‘micropub’-style licenced venue (with the floorspace dedicated to the pub reducing from 153 to 59 square metres).
With the SOWH campaign now well established and the ACV status in place, the planning officer recommended that the application be refused. The modifications to the building would ‘result in harm to a designated heritage asset’. Somewhat ironically, the committee also ruled that any public benefits offered by the micropub were in doubt due to concerns about its viability.
As Ian – chair of SOWH since 2020 – argues, the micropub element was ‘clearly a trojan horse’; a way of getting planning permission to convert part of the pub into a private residence in the short term, with a view to converting the rest of it at a future date once ‘he can demonstrate that the micropub wasn’t viable’.
Tomlinson, for his part, maintains that the micropub proposal was genuine and that the intention has always been to turn it back into a pub. He argues that the White Horse cannot survive in its current form; requiring it is either expanded to allow for a greater food offering, or its subdivision so that it can benefit from other revenue streams such as rent paid via the office space and private residence.
When we began our research in Kimpton in 2024 it had been three years since the planning application to convert the White Horse into a micropub had been rejected, and 10 years since the pub had closed. However, residents involved with SOWH were continuing to campaign. On a warm summer’s day we met with chair of SOWH, Ian, and two fellow committee members – Wendy and Jackie – to conduct a group interview while walking around the village.
Ian led the way, holding onto a print-out of the ‘Kimpton Heritage Trail’. We were shown several English Heritage ‘blue plaques’ commemorating the sites of former pubs and breweries. Ian informed us that at the start of the 20th century there were seven pubs in the village, primarily catering to the needs of local agricultural workers. Our hosts pointed out several buildings which had once housed shops and other amenities, since converted into housing.
Although there are clear signs of community amenities being converted to residential use in Kimpton, this is not to say that Kimpton is especially lacking in amenities and civic spaces. Compared to another rural village we have explored as part of this research, Kimpton feels like a well serviced village with a thriving civic and associational life. On our tour we came across pristine tennis courts complete with floodlights and a small clubhouse (itself a product of a village fundraising and membership drive), a large and active 13th century Anglican Church, a village shop, The Boot pub, and two other community spaces – the Memorial Hall and The Dacre Rooms, the latter recently refurbished. We were informed that the Kimpton History Group, which had put together the Heritage Trail, was one of around 60 clubs and societies active in the village. This also includes an art club, a radio club, an array of sports teams, a ‘bench working party’ who do maintenance work and upkeep around the village, and even a sailing club – despite Kimpton being about as far away from the sea as an English village could possibly be.
Every now and again a Lycra-clad cyclist glided past, prompting discussion about how expensive their kit was. Ian described how part of the business plan for a community-owned White Horse would be to try to cater to this affluent cyclist market, opening-up the courtyard to give somewhere for the cyclists to park their bikes and order refreshments. Another potential market for a reopened pub could be the walkers drawn through the village on several footpaths cutting across the surrounding fields and lanes.
We also passed multiple construction sites for new housing, which Ian guessed would sell for around a million pounds each. Such construction both represents a challenge and an opportunity for the SOWH campaign. On the one hand, the demand for new housing in the village is part of what incentives developers to try to convert pubs for residential use. On the other hand, the village is expanding, creating a larger potential market for a reopened pub.
Being a relatively affluent village has been of help in the SOWH campaign’s ability to raise the capital for a community ownership bid. But perhaps of greater importance are the networks of people with the time, skills and motivation to commit to make the campaign a success – what sociologists call ‘social capital’.
Our hosts acknowledged how they had benefitted from having local people with skills ready to lend a hand to the campaign. On our walk we bumped into the woman who had offered her professional skills as a graphic designer to create the campaign’s various posters, flyers and a large banner that still adorns a T-junction near the village entrance. As Ian put it:
‘we’ve been incredibly lucky to get someone like her… We’ve got a journalist, a copywriter, an ex-banker who does our treasury, I’m from a project management background – we know there’s a load of people around. Once we get something to go at, the skills are there.’
Ian emphasised how community ownership campaigns are also response to a need, particularly in rural areas, where commercial operators – particularly the big ‘pub cos’ – might be less willing to invest. The data seems to back this up: A report from Plunkett UK in 2022 stated that out of 125 of the 147 community-owned pubs then in existence were in rural areas. Looking at their distribution across counties and regions using data from CAMRA, the places with the highest numbers of community-owned and run pubs per capita in more remote rural areas: Argyle and the Isles in Scotland (4.48 pubs per 100K people), North-West Wales (2.58), Shropshire (2.15), Suffolk (1.58) and Herefordshire (1.54).
Local skills and resources have been important in sustaining the campaign over the past decade. But even with these advantages, 10 years is a long time. Finishing our walk outside The White Horse, we observed paint peeling off the window frames and the old wooden signpost standing with a hollow void where the pub sign itself once was. Ian pointed out how blocked drains and inadequate guttering had led to water penetrating the building, causing several supporting floor beams inside to rot and give way. He acknowledged the risk of ‘campaign fatigue’ and linked this to perceptions of the pub’s increasing dilapidation.
‘You risk losing interest, you start to lose the market, people get despondent… the time can just erode people’s enthusiasm’.
Ian and the other SOWH committee members are therefore faced with a difficult balancing act: on the one hand, keeping people engaged by providing updates and a sense that the situation might eventually be resolved in their favour. But on the other hand, not asking too much of people, or raising people’s expectations of an imminent break-through when there are no guarantees. Ian explained that:
‘it’s always the fine line that we’re treading at the minute, if you keep pulling people together with the promise of something and there’s nothing to say – it is a campaign challenge.’
One source of hope and optimism has been the success of other campaigns in the area. SOWH committee members were heartened particularly by the news in the summer of 2024 that the Rose and Crown, a similar sized pub in Aston, east Hertfordshire, with a population less than half the size of Kimpton, had successfully reopened as a thriving community owned pub. They regarded the Rose and Crown as in some ways their ‘sister’ campaign, the pub having been sold off at the same time by the same brewery. If campaigners in Aston had managed to reopen their pub after such a long period of closure and coexist with another pub with a quite different clientele nearby, the same thing might be possible here. Other recent nearby success stories include The Station in Knebworth, bought by the Parish Council in 2020 after a three-year campaign against redevelopment; and The Plough in Ley Green, saved from being redeveloped into a four-bedroom house in 2024 after a spirited campaign led by local residents.
Another way that the campaign has sought to sustain morale is by running ‘pop-up pub’ events at a community venue – The Dacre Rooms – immediately opposite The White Horse. Ian described these events, running a couple of times a year, as a ‘proof of concept’ for a future community-owned pub. By getting people together, with beer from a local brewery and live music, attendees can get a sense of what a reopened White Horse might be like. Ian explained that it could also help demonstrate to council planners that there is an active community, ready to take on the pub and restore it as an amenity for the village to enjoy.
At the pop-up pub we attended in December 2024, by around 9pm there were 50 people in attendance, with the band in full flow and people up on the dancefloor. There was a convivial atmosphere, with residents drinking and chatting to one another in extended groups. It was clearly a successful event.
However, our visit to the pop-up pub also brought home some of the difficulties faced by the campaign. On the same night, the other pub in the village – The Boot – was holding its own event, celebrating switching on their Christmas lights. We paid a visit before going to the pop-up pub to talk to customers and staff. Enjoying the homemade mince pies and biscuits at the bar we encountered scepticism from those present about the SOWH campaign. One person was concerned that reopening The White Horse could take custom away from The Boot and might even lead to a situation where both pubs were forced to close.
SOWH committee members counter that the two pubs cater to different markets and that based on the average number of pubs per head population across the UK, the population of the village (2,000+ people and growing) could easily support both pubs. As Ian put it, The Boot:
‘only caters for half the market. There’s a lot of people who prefer a different type of pub, not that there’s anything wrong with it – we [the SOWH committee members] all drink in there at various times – but it’s not what more than half the village want.’
Ian related these different ‘markets’ to the village’s evolving housing stock. This comprises an ‘old village’ formed of 18th and 19th century housing, a modernist council estate built in the 1970s, and more recent pockets of infill development. Ian suggests that the growing affluence of the village in recent years has bolstered the market for a different pub offering. Whereas The Boot has more of a motel and ‘sports bar’ feel, with TV screens showing Sky Sports, and gaming machines, the vision for The White Horse would have more of an emphasis on food, coffee, locally sourced cask ales – or what Cherry describes as ‘a traditional cosy log fire pub’.
Keen to downplay a sense of ‘rivalry’ between The Boot and SOWH, Cherry argued that there could also be synergies between the two pubs. Rather than the reopening of the White Horse potentially taking custom away from The Boot, having two pubs in Kimpton could serve to bring more people into both. She suggests that people might choose to visit both pubs on an evening out – for example, having a drink at The Boot on the way to having dinner at The White Horse, or vice versa:
‘It makes [Kimpton] more lively and people in neighbouring villages might think, Friday night, “shall we go down to Kimpton? Because you’ve got two options there.” So, this idea that the village can only support one venue, it’s not true.’
At the pop-up pub event we spoke to other residents who corroborated Cherry’s argument. Callum and Nancy, a couple in their late 20s, said that they intended to call into The Boot for a drink on their way home. Pointing out that both The Boot and the pop-up pub were full of people, Callum argued that there were ‘more than enough people [in Kimpton] for two pubs’. They liked the idea of being able to do a mini-pub crawl in Kimpton, especially when they have friends to stay for the weekend. The White Horse reopening would be ‘another thing to do in the village’. As far as they were concerned ‘the more going on, the better’.
The emphasis on ‘community’ in debates about pub closure is often singular. Pubs are assumed to map onto singular communities which – particularly in the case of rural pub closures – map onto singular places. But as the case of the White Horse shows, in practice, the relationship between pubs, places and communities are more complex.
The fact that there was already a pub in Kimpton is wielded against the SOWH campaign by those proposing to redevelop. In the planning officer’s initial recommendation in favour of the 2015 plans, alongside concerns about ‘viability’, ‘the presence of another public house in the vicinity’ was a reason stated as to why they were unconvinced that ‘the permanent loss of this public house would be significantly harmful to the provision of community facilities in the village’. In other words, they were saying: ‘the community’ already has a pub, does it really need another one?
Some of the ways in which pubs have been promoted as spaces of ‘community cohesion’ arguably maps onto this logic. A 2012 IPPR report ‘Pubs and Places: The Social Value of Community Pubs’ presents survey data to argue that pubs are the ‘most important social institution for promoting social interactions between people from different backgrounds at the local level’. The pub, they argue is a ‘a great social leveller’, bringing people into contact with others from different backgrounds within a more or less egalitarian environment. But if this is the most important thing about a pub it could be argued that, for the sake of ‘community cohesion’, it would be better to have one pub, rather than two pubs serving distinct communities.
Pubs have always been places marked by social distinctions as well as forms of social mixing. While the Victorian practice of subdividing pubs into more and less ‘respectable’ rooms was replaced in the 20th century with gradual removal of such partitions, such distinctions (around class, gender, ethnicity, age etc.) still exist between pubs. Kimpton residents who we spoke to at the pop-up pub event commented that The Boot was ‘quite a male focused’ atmosphere, which made them disinclined to go there. In a separate interview, Cherry described how on moving to the village as a single, working mother, the White Horse had been an important place where she could go and get some work done in a way that she wouldn’t have felt as ‘comfortable’ doing in the Boot. She recalled that:
‘because I was so busy at that point of my life, I couldn’t even clean my cottage … the cleaner would come for a come for a couple of hours – and I would rush into The White Horse and sit there with a half of lager, you know, tapping away, doing my writing work. It was closer to me, okay, but it was easier – more comfortable – for me to do that in The White Horse than it was in The Boot… I could tuck myself in a little cosy corner, have the half of lager, and carry on working.’
Cherry said The White Horse would also be her preferred place to ‘meet a friend for a gin and tonic’, adding that it had a more ‘cosy atmosphere’ whereas in contrast The Boot was ‘too brightly lit’. While she does use The Boot and gets on well with the landlady, Cherry joked that ‘any woman over 40 does not want to be sitting in that bright light!’
The image of the ‘last pub in the village’ frequently appears in media stories about pub closure, eliciting sympathy for the plight of rural communities who are at risk of losing their last social spaces. The story of the White Horse, as the penultimate pub in the village, doesn’t quite have the same emotional resonance. It is perhaps a less ‘deserving’ story of pub closure, in that – as developers and planning officers have themselves suggested – residents who want a pub will find one a couple of minutes’ walk up the road.
But the idea that rural villages only need one pub does not recognise the reality that places such as Kimpton are comprised of multiple, overlapping ‘communities’. The population of Kimpton has varying work-life rhythms; when we visited The Boot mid-afternoon on a weekday there were a couple of tradesman. A younger man attending the switching on of the Christmas lights told us about how he goes to The Boot at the weekends with his friends to watch the football. Alongside this there are a growing community of people who commute to London from the nearby train station, facilitated by the introduction of faster connections in recent years. The village is also very popular with affluent retirees.
It would also be wrong, as Neil argued, to assume that the closure of one pub in a village necessarily will ‘mean your second one will be stronger’. Rather the ‘loss of community activity’ brought about by the closure of the first pub might mean that ‘you… lose the second one as well’. While the village may be well serviced by community amenities compared with other villages, Neil argued that this could be gradually eroded over time, noting recent closures of a GP surgery and a children’s nursery. Indeed, research by Ignazio Cabras and others has shown that the presence of pubs in rural areas is positively correlated with various measures of community cohesion and local economic activity, suggesting the gradual loss of such facilities could lead to a downward spiral. With more houses and fewer amenities Neil insisted it’s important to keep an eye on this ‘bigger picture’ – ‘where is Kimpton as a community going?’.
With the White Horse empty for 11 years and counting, it’s a question which is overdue a resolution. This case study illustrates how, while programmes of support for community ownership since the 2011 Localism Act has contributed to a substantial uptick in community ownership of pubs, community groups can still be easily out-competed by property developers willing to pay over the odds with the promise of significant returns for conversion to residential use. The government has promised to strengthen legislation to upgrade this ‘right to bid’ to a ‘right to buy’, meaning that communities will have first refusal on the purchase of local assets when they come up for sale, with a fair price determined by an independent valuer – mirroring powers which already exist in Scotland. If this legislation had been in place back in 2016, the White Horse might by now have been reopened as a community-owned pub. Strengthening legislation will hopefully help to prevent another long-running planning saga such as this. As for The White Horse and the steadfast SOWH campaigners, the long search for a resolution continues.