News of a reprieve prompted audible sighs of relief around Obiter Towers this week. On Monday, we learned that Legal London’s busiest watering hole, which closed on 17 March following a memorable St Patrick’s Day bash, is to continue as a pub rather than as a coffee shop or - horrors - a law office. Wetherspoons’ former Knights Templar will reopen under new management in early May.
Refurbishment work has begun in earnest on the magnificent former headquarters of the Union Bank, which dates from 1865 (not from the 14th century, as one online guidebook suggests).
The new operator is Berkeley Inns, a company set up in 2014 to acquire and re-develop ‘unloved or closed but prominent pubs’ in the Midlands. ‘Our mission is to create viable, high-quality food-led establishments while recapturing or maintaining the atmosphere of the local village pub,’ its website maintains. We’re not sure that the Templar ever had the atmosphere of a local village pub - for that, try the Seven Stars down the road - but we look forward to sampling its wares.
One quibble. Berkeley tells Obiter that the pub will be renamed ‘The Last Judgement’. If the new guv’nors wish to lure back a legal clientele, they might consider dropping that middle ‘e’.
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