The Circus Tavern on Portland Street is one of the best loved pubs in Manchester. It also holds the claim of being the smallest pub in Europe, with patrons sitting cheek-by-jowl inside the tiny, but perfectly formed two-room hostelry.
But its owner Barry Hayes has said that he’s still locked in a row over rent with the pub’s landlords, Star Pubs & Bars, owned by brewing giant Heineken, more than a year after they told him he owes over £90,000, despite being closed and unable to operate during lockdown.
Star Pubs, which Barry calls ‘horrible people, absolute parasites’, are pursuing him for rent in a ‘David and Goliath’ battle that is heading for arbitration, he says. “They want full rent off me for a period of time when I wasn’t open for 14 months, which I think is absolutely diabolical. But they just don’t care about you,” he told the Manchester Evening News.
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“I gave them £1,000 a month while I was closed. How can you charge me for the rent in the pub, when I’ve not been able to work? Even when social distancing came about, it wasn’t worth opening because of the two metre rule. You’d have only been able to seat four people in the front and four people in the back, it wasn’t viable.
“It’s left a sour taste in the mouth. They’re the second biggest brewery in the world, and it’s David versus Goliath, and they couldn’t care less. They’re just trying to take me to the cleaners... these aren't brewery people. They're bankers, basically, and this is just another easy way of making money. I'd never get into bed with a brewery ever again.”
Barry says that Star Pubs, with whom he still has a seven-and-a-half year lease agreement, has offered a discount of 40% of the figure, but he plans to fight them in court instead and 'hope that the arbitrator sees sense, and gives me some kind of parity with what goes on elsewhere, and a bit of fairness’.
“Even at 40%, it’s still too much,” he went on. “I just don’t think it’s right, and I know that other people have negotiated better deals.
“Everything’s gone up. The gas that I use for the beer, that’s gone up 50% in the last 12 months. It’s absolute madness.”
Barry has been landlord at the pub for 12 years, and took it on after taking redundancy from British Telecom. He had never run a pub prior to taking on the Circus.
A spokesperson for Star Pubs & Bars said: “We understand the pressure that pubs faced during the pandemic and did our best to help them. We supported our leased and tenanted pubs, where we have a shared risk agreement, with substantial rent reductions totalling £62million.
“For the small amount of our pubs which have chosen to opt out of the shared risk agreement and operate their pubs on a Market Rent Only lease basis, similar to a conventional commercial lease, we still offered them support.
“Rents were deferred whilst they were closed and they received support totalling £1 million. We know through benchmarking that the support we have put in place for Market Rent Only leases goes above and beyond that of some other commercial landlords.”
Star Pubs & Bars is also the landlord of the Britons Protection, which launched a campaign to save the historic pub from being taken back into the brewery’s managed house scheme. Owners of the pub said that such a move would render the pub unrecognisable, as it would only be able to buy its products via the brewery, meaning that things like its real ale offerings and huge whiskey collection would become obsolete.
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