Dave Richardson meets the owner of a pub company having an impact on the Oxford scene
When the former Angel & Greyhound re-opens with its previous name – the Oranges & Lemons – it marks another step forward for a small but growing pub operator that few in Oxford had heard of until 2023 – the Morgan Pub Collective. It re-opened the Grapes in George Street in August that year, and it was named Oxford CAMRA City Pub of the Year just over a year later.
Morgan then re-opened another pub that had been closed for an extended period, the Gardeners Arms in North Parade Avenue, in October 2023. But this pub was not a success, closing down in January this year as the company admitted it was too small, in that location, to be viable.
Morgan’s business model is to take long leases on pubs, the properties being owned by various companies including Greene King which owns the Gardeners Arms (not to be confused with the Gardeners Arms in nearby Plantation Road). The Grapes is owned by the city council, and new addition the Oranges & Lemons by a property company which bought it recently from Young’s.
This St Clement’s Street pub is an exciting prospect for real ale and craft keg lovers, as it plans to offer one of the largest choices in the city with up to eight cask lines and 30 keg taps. Reverting to its previous name from 1970 until bought by Young’s in the 1990s, it is currently having a makeover but due to re-open by late January.
This is where I caught up with Dick Morgan, the company’s founder, to find out more about a company tracing its origins back over 50 years to when he ran his first pub, the Oporto in Central London, now the Craft Beer Co Covent Garden. But his pub journey actually started in 1961 when, as a boy, he was washing bottles at the Vine in Kentish Town.
“I was working behind a bar while still at school, earning 30 shillings (£1.50) per session,” he recalled. “At college I did business studies, but it didn’t suit me. I was soon back working full-time in pubs, and I’ve never really done anything else.
“But I’m not one who believes it was all wonderful years ago. We want to operate pubs offering a traditional welcome, but with much improved standards. There’s still demand for what people perceive as a traditional pub, but people demand a lot more nowadays. It’s now recognised that a well-run pub is very much a middle class place, often with meals. If you want cheap beer then you go to Tesco, but you go to a pub for the experience.”
Dick has worked with various breweries and pubcos over the years, including Watneys, Allied, GK and Stonegate. His dislike of the business studies course is ironic as he’s now known as a shrewd businessman, and with a couple of exceptions where he operates tied pubs, you wouldn’t guess who owns the pub. What is a Morgan pub, I ask? And as his property agent remains on the look-out, what is a potential Morgan pub?
“I’m a big believer not just in real ale but in real pubs,” he answered. “You’ve got to get the ambience right as well as the product. The Sussex Arms in Twickenham has 16 hand pumps but it also sells a lot of food and wine. At the Grapes in Oxford, the food offer is simple because of its small size. My property agent said I should look at the Grapes, as it was very similar to our Lyric pub in Soho. It’s been very nice to bring it back to life with a wide range of cask and keg ales, as at the Lyric.”
Morgan pub managers are given plenty of freedom to choose their beers, and Johnny Roberts – landlord of the Grapes who is also involved at the Oranges & Lemons – has proved a good friend to CAMRA with an ever changing roster of ales, Harvey’s Sussex Best being a regular. So how does Dick feel about the future of real ale?
“Real ale sales go up and down, and volumes have gone down over the last couple of years and are still falling as there’s a shift to keg products,” he said. “But if real ale is what people want we’ll increase the range, as here at the Oranges & Lemons.
“Young’s had spent a lot of money on this pub quite recently, but when it was put on the market we thought we could bring something different to this site. Young’s runs pubs in exactly the same way wherever they are, with the same menus, whereas we would adapt to local markets. People ask why did Young’s sell this but it must be because they couldn’t make it pay. They were adding a 12.5% service charge to food in a big student area.”
The beer range here changed very soon after purchase. Cask ales Young’s London Original and London Special were replaced by a range of independent real ales and a cask cider. Two-for-one food offers have been introduced, and it may even restore pub games. The huge photograph of punk era customers outside the Oranges & Lemons taken in 1979, which adorns a wall, will remain.
Some Morgan pubs are known for their vinyl record players and traditional photographs and prints, whereas others have live music. It all depends on the size of the pub, the locality and of course the customer base, in contrast to the corporate approach taken by many pubcos and breweries.
Morgan’s 26 pubs are in locations as varied as Soho in Central London and Chichester, West Sussex, and t also operates the Argyll in Henley-on-Thames. There is a particular concentration in the south-western suburbs of London and in Surrey, and it has just taken on a second pub in Twickenham, the George, leased from Greene King but to operate as a free house. As Morgan operates its own food delivery business, further expansion around where existing pubs are situated would make sense.
“If the deals are right then we will continue to add pubs, but I’m not out to build an estate of another 20 in the next few years,” said Dick. “We don’t brand our pubs, as a pub collective is exactly what it means and you won’t see any corporate signs outside.
“Our philosophy will stay the same – getting the right person into the right pub for them, with the right attitude and the right product whether it’s real ale, wine, food or music. It seems to be successful.”
When the upcoming ITV/ITVX drama A Cruel Love: the Ruth Ellis Story is aired, glasses will clink in celebration at the Magdala, a Morgan pub close to Hampstead Heath in London. They probably won’t be celebrating a notorious murder and murderess, but because Ruth Ellis shot her lover David Blakely outside this very pub, the TV series is bound to bring extra trade. She was the last woman executed in Britain, in 1955, and the salacious details of her life as a “nightclub hostess” have inspired numerous films, documentaries and plays ever since. A previous landlady of the Magdala apparently had “bullet holes” put in the wall much later to burnish the legend!
But for now, making the Oranges & Lemons a success is the priority for Morgan. If the Grapes is anything to go by, Oxford CAMRA will offer it full support.