Regulars raise over £175,000 for pub

A COMMUNITY desperate to save its only pub has managed to raise almost £200,000 in just eight weeks. The staggering amount of money has been generated by locals living in and around the village of Crymych in north Pembrokeshire.

A share offer to buy the Crymych Arms was officially launched on April 1 of this year with an initial target of £175,000 to be raised by May 31.

With a couple of days to spare, a total of £191,000 has been built up through the community share offer. It’s now hoped that if grant funding bids are successful – together with further cash being raised through the sale of £100-each shares – the pub could even be open by the end of the summer.

A big part of that plan is for the Crymych Arms to be the new clubhouse for the local football team, who were only formed three years ago. The club have registered themselves as a mutual society cooperative, and they hope the venue will become not just a local pub and a football club, but also a hub for the whole community – what organisers are calling a ‘Pubclubhub.’

The way the share offering works is that everyone and anyone is able to buy a share, or shares, and therefore own their own part of the Crymych Arms.

One share costs £100 (which can even be paid for in instalments), and people can buy as many as they like up to a maximum value of £100,000 per person. Crucially, one share will equal one vote, so everyone will have a say in the pub’s future and the way it is run, regardless of the size of their respective stake.

There has been and continues to be a real drive in Crymych to reopen the pub. It’s a village that’s had a pub at its heart for generations, but current owners Bill and Meima Evans want to retire, having run the pub since 1984 and pulled their last pint in September, 2021, after battling on when allowed to do so throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. And while there is a rugby club up the road which is still operating, the Crymych Arms was the village’s only pub, and it had become the only social outlet for many

“When you lose a pub you lose touch with people,” said local community councillor Cris Tomos, who is also an asset co-ordinator at PLANED – a community-led organisation which has experience in the kind of initiative taking place in Crymych.

“It’s a real issue moving forward, both socially and economically. Local pubs and local shops are just not there and I think it’s something that the country in a wider context needs to address.”

The next public meeting, which is open to anyone who wishes to know more about the venture, will be held at 7pm on Wednesday, June 14, at Crymych Market Hall.