- Henry Potts bar, located on Watergate Street in Chester has been forced to shut
A pub boss who was forced to close due to a lack of business has blamed locals working from home for turning its historic location into a ‘ghost town’.
Henry Potts bar, located on Watergate Street in Chester, opened in June 2022 but has now shut its doors for the final time – much to the annoyance of boss Jeremy Brunning.
Mr Brunning, 68, has bemoaned ‘ridiculous electricity bills’ and the ‘irony’ of people choosing to work from home.
Posting a statement to the pub’s website, Mr Brunning lamented: ‘If you saw the numbers they’d look like a lot but in today’s economic environment, with ridiculous electricity bills and a host of other inflationary costs, it needs to be busier to be viable. So we must close.
‘We’d like to say a huge thank you to the pub’s hardworking team. They’ve made us very proud and we are doing what we can to keep and relocate those who want to.
Henry Potts bar, located on Watergate Street in Chester, opened in June 2022 but has now been forced to shut its doors for the final time
‘I think we’d easily have been able to make it if more people were in their offices and keen for lunch and early evening refreshment, but most seem to be working from home. The commercial heart of Chester is a bit of a ghost town.’
Despite announcing the closure of the pub, Jeremy said that it had not yet been bought despite being listed for sale.
He added: ‘We’re not getting rid of it just yet, we have offered it for sale but no bites, so we are going to mothball it for the foreseeable future and see if things improve. It’s such a shame. We’ll keep you informed of any change.
‘If you have enjoyed The Potts then thank you, and sorry to be the bearer of bad news. You’ll be pleased to hear that our other four pubs are thriving, so why not go to one of those instead. A nice thing to do if you’re WFH (there’s an irony).’
Reacting to the news of the pub’s closure on social media, a number of locals paid tribute, as they wrote:
‘RIP best roast in Chester’.
‘Heartbreaking’.
‘All top staff throughout. Look at it as an opportunity to move forward.’
Despite announcing the closure of the pub, Jeremy Brunning said that it had not yet been bought despite being listed for sale
His comments come after data from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) shows that just 14% of people worked exclusively from their home between May 22 and June 2 this year.
This is in contrast to 38% of Britons working at home in June 2020 – when the UK was in its first lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Over the same 10-day period as above, 26% of people worked on a hybrid basis , both travelling to work and working from home.
It has been followed by a study which revealed that one in five staff get frustrated when they find out some of their co-workers are logging on to virtual meetings from the beach or beside the pool.
Meanwhile, nearly a quarter of staff have voiced their concerns that those who are abroad are not being as productive as workers who are still in the office.
The research, which was commissioned by price comparison website MoneySuperMarket, also found that a quarter of office-based workers said their colleagues abroad missed deadlines because of time-zone differences.
The rise of remote work policies skyrocketed during the Covid pandemic as lockdowns and self-isolation policies forced employers to allow people to do their jobs from home.
Since then many firms have kept these in place for fear of staff deciding to leave if they are forced back into the office, and now a third of the UK workforce is now employed by companies that allow them to do their jobs from home.
The study work-from-anywhere policies made staff more likely to stay with their employer, while a third said they thought it increased productivity, in contrast to the quarter of staff who though it caused a hit to productivity.