Robert Thomas owns 17 locals across North and East London under the brand Remarkable Pubs.
They include The Shaftesbury Tavern in Archway Road, The Shakespeare in Stoke Newington, The Rosemary Branch in Islington, and The European in Leyton – which the staunch EU remainer bought from Wetherspoons founder and arch Brexiteer Sir Tim Martin, and renamed earlier this year.
He said it was “a huge surprise and pleasure” to be honoured by the London Branches of CAMRA for the John Young Memorial award – as someone who has made a major impact on real ale and pubs in London.
It all started 40 years ago with the Prince George in London Fields, which is still his local.
Thomas’s wife Jean used to cycle past the Parkholme Road pub, which he says is on a “street with lovely Victorian and Georgian homes”.
They wondered about turning it into flats, but owner Whitbread would only let it as a tenancy.
“My wife and I were converting old houses, which you could buy for pennies in those days in London Fields, into flats,” he says.
“She said ‘I have just seen this business in Parkholme Road it would make three lovely flats’ so we went down to look at it hoping to buy it.
“When they said the tenancy was available I said: ‘I am an ex-school teacher, I know nothing about running pubs.’ They said it would cost £100 a month and I couldn’t see how it could fail.”
“That was 40 years ago,” says Thomas, who describes his business as “a series of coincidences, misadventure, and blind opportunism”.
Back in 1985 London Fields was going through the early stages of gentrification, but the only cask ales on offer at the Prince George were Guinness and Whitbread Tankard.
He recalls: “I asked the outgoing tenant why he didn’t feature more beers and he said ‘there’s no call for it around here Guv’.
“He said ‘we did have a couple that we got it in for but they moved to Basildon’.”
When Jean and Robert opened the pub six weeks later with six new polished brass beer engines, they sold out six firkins of real ale on opening night.
Jean, an artist, had sanded and varnished the old floorboards, installed church pews, cast iron tables and pub benches, and stripped out formica to reveal a mahogany 1830s back bar complete with Ionic columns.
With a jukebox that Time Out hailed as the best in London, the punters flocked in – Whitbread sold the pub to Thomas 20 years later for £1 million.
“We had all sorts of creative people like the artist Rachel Whiteread coming in and a lot of help from those people building the pubs up,” he says.
“Forty years on I still get that feeling of joy entering the Prince George. There is always someone to discuss the events of the day or celebrate with.”
During the 1990s property slump, he bought several pubs when the breweries were divesting their portfolios.
“I started buying them for around £100,000, that’s how I got going – of course Hackney exploded and those places are worth a lot now.”
As freeholder he can buy his beer for far less than tenants tied to leases with large pub companies – and has taken a chance on London neighbourhoods that appeared unpromising.
He bought the Boleyn Tavern in Upton Park several years after West Ham had left their old ground and it had hit a slump. He then spent 18 months and £1.5 million restoring it to its former glory before reopening in 2021.
He said: “It’s one of those huge gin palaces full of etched glass, right in front of the old ground which moved to Stratford. It had lost all its customers – who were a pretty rough crowd anyway – but now it’s doing OK.”
At The Holly Tree in Forest Gate he spotted a huge garden big enough for a train for children to ride around on “so I put one in”.
And The Approach Tavern in Bethnal Green has an art gallery above it.
“The area is full of artists studios but still quite rough,” he says. “Bianca Jagger came and left her coat on the hat stand and someone nicked it.”
The Lord Tredegar in Bow was so run down that a friend told him ‘You have lost it this time, what the hell are you doing?’
The ceiling had collapsed and the garden had tonnes of rubbish, which needed to be wheeled through the bar to clear it.
“I like buying those old neglected places, taking them on and giving them a chance,” he says.
“We opened on New Year’s Eve, the place was rammed and never looked back.”
He says the cost of living doesn’t affect his takings because London is “impervious to slowdowns”, and he dislikes all the gloom and doom around pub closures.
“My explanation is, in good times people come and order Champagne, in bad times they come and drown their sorrows!
“The best pubs have a landlord with a bit of a personality and draw an interesting crowd. Ours are very busy – we specialise in neighbourhood pubs where the vicar comes in on Sundays and locals come in with friends – we’re not tied to any brewery so can change the beers regularly and give people what they want.”
He adds: “This is such an interesting business; the people you meet and chat to – I’m always interested in buying new sites. It keeps me alive and kicking.”
