Radical pay-what-you-can restaurant faces eviction from mill it refurbished

A Gloucestershire restaurant with a radical business model, in that it feeds all comers regardless of their ability to pay, is losing its premises after the owner sold the property.

The community around The Long Table, featured in the Guardian earlier this month, has been left reeling after it was ordered to move out of the mill it occupies in Stroud – even as it sought to engage with the landlord to buy the building.

It means the mill will be transformed from a valued community resource – it also houses a bike workshop, secondhand children’s gear supplier and a furniture bank – into a warehouse for a local business that has bought the site.

More than 50 jobs are at risk if its businesses are forced to close.

Tom Herbert, the co-founder of The Long Table, said the community had ploughed in thousands of hours of work and as much as £300,000 in cash over three years in order to transform Brimscombe Mill from a derelict site into a bustling social centre.

“It had been derelict for 30 years, roof falling in, no services, no electricity, no water,” Herbert said.

“It had been used as a place for local kids to hang out and play their music. There were people sleeping rough in it, it had human excrement in it. The place was a shithole basically, that no one else wanted.”

Faced with security problems that made the site a liability, the landlord gave The Long Table and its partner businesses a five-year lease, with a break clause at years three and four, at a near peppercorn rent of £15,000 a year. “The community rolled up their sleeves, people put in cash … it was just amazing,” said Herbert.

“We spent several hundred thousand [pounds] on making the building habitable, fixing up the roof, fixing up the flooring, which had big puddles in it and great big holes, painting the whole thing white so it looks clean, and then a lot of electrics and putting in a kitchen and things like that.”

The work was done in good faith, said Herbert, and on the hope that there would be the opportunity to extend the lease, or to be given the option to buy it if the landlord chose to sell. Meanwhile the popularity and reputation of the restaurant and the other businesses continued to grow.

It was the day after the Guardian’s story on The Long Table was published that they were given notice to leave. Now they have until 25 August to pack up and find somewhere new. Until then, Herbert says, it is “Operation Fill the Mill”.

“We want more events, more activities, more people [coming] that have heard about us but haven’t got around to it to come and visit us,” he said. The mill will be holding two community events in an effort to figure out its next steps, and where local people will be invited along to share ideas.

Herbert still holds out hope they will be able to find a way to stay in the building. Members of the community in Stroud have already begun soliciting signatures for an open letter to the site’s new owner calling on him to let them stay.

“That’s part of what the community consultation and conversation is, to listen to people and see, if people are signing letters of support, can we get a toe in the door with the new landlord and say: ‘Come on mate, be the hero. We’ll name a building after you if you sell it to us,’” Herbert said.

The Guardian has approached the landlord for comment.

Meanwhile, the search is on for a new home. But Herbert remains optimistic.

“The team are really feeling hurt and shocked by what’s happened, and powerless,” he said. “[But] the support of our community has just been phenomenal, and that makes us feel like … it really makes us feel hopeful.

“And the thing I love to say is that amazing things happen when we eat together … I want to find ways of growing the table longer and longer and longer, and the more people that eat together, the better.”