A husband and wife are renovating the old bank in Birkenhead into a joint tattoo and yoga parlour.
Adam and Louise Allward, 34 and 38, are following their dreams to create a business together which utilises their respective trades of tattooing and yoga. They hope to open their joint studio, called Beyond the Pines, in mid-April in an old bank in Claughton Village.
Adam told the ECHO: “During lockdown with all the time off we had me and my wife, who’s just become a qualified yoga instructor were talking a lot about where we wanted to go with our lives and what we wanted to do. We realised the end goal is to open a little retreat in North Wales, where she teaches yoga and I’ll have a little studio, so we can be quite isolated from everyone but still do our work.
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“But we decided the first step would be to open a studio for us both to use closer to where we both live. This new studio is about a minute walk from our house. It’s taken almost a year to get the lease sorted out.”
They are renovating the studio mostly on their own thanks to Adam’s previous experience renovating Devil’s Club Tattoo parlour in the Cavern Quarter, which he did with his business partner, Craig.
Adam said: “I think it’ll be really good for the area as well as there have been quite a few people who wanted the place to open a restaurant or a café but the landlord wasn’t too keen to open anything like that in the area because we’ve got Oxton just down the road, which is already full of cafés and restaurants. So when we approached them with the idea to open a tattoo shop and a yoga studio he was pretty excited about it.
"We’ve noticed when we’ve been in there renovating with the doors open to let air in, a lot of older people from the community have come in and asked what it’s going to be. When I say it’s going to be a tattoo studio some of them are like 'oh no that’s not for me'.
"But then as soon as I mention my wife’s also going to teach yoga classes here there I get their attention and they’re like oh, I’ll definitely come for that. I feel like if you’re not interested in one then the other aspect will interest you.”
The building the studio is currently being constructed in first opened in 1914 and was one of the last offices held by the Bank of Liverpool and more recently it has been a Barclays, a bar, and a restaurant. The legacy of the place was part of the attraction for the Allwards.
“I think utilising these old buildings is massive. When we were changing the use of the property we had to put up a public statement and there were a few people from the area who commented on how happy they were that someone was taking the building over and doing something useful with it. Because it is a beautiful building and It’d been empty for three years.
“It’s a beautiful old building, its got so much character, and I’m so glad that me and my wife have got it and we’re going to do something modern, mixing tattooing and yoga, and juxtapose it with the old building. I’ll be glad to bring something here because there’s nothing like that in the area at all.”
