Buying and refurbishing the Cardigan Arms pub
Help save one of Britain’s top 250 Heritage Pubs
Be a founding shareholder of Leeds first community pub
Chance to earn 4% interest if you become a Cardigan Angel and invest £5,000
None of your money will be taken if we don’t get the pub
SHARE TARGET £300,000 by May 29th
Veterans of this once great pub throughout Leeds and beyond – this is your chance to make it great again!
The Cardigan Arms is a Grade II listed pub, one of the top 250 heritage pubs in Britain. It achieved that listing because of its almost unaltered interior layout (five rooms around a central bar) and multiple heritage features.
Upstairs is a 100 capacity events room, two other rooms and a kitchen. At the back is a disused brew house and down in the cellar the shower room for sports teams.
It was heaving in the ‘80s and early ’90s but in recent years has fallen on hard times, with no landlord commitment and a series of tenants passing through. The Cardy has a following throughout Leeds, people who remember it for the music, sport and general warm atmosphere. That is what we want to take it back to.
‘Saving’ the Cardy is more that keeping it open. There will be other bidders for the pub; some wanting to turn all but the ground floor into flats.
We want to save it as a community pub, the first in Leeds and one of the first urban co-operatively owned pubs in the country.
The Plan
To raise sufficient money and give us the experience of pub management, we have partnered with Mood Pubs, a small company with experience of refurbishing heritage pubs. We will form a joint management company with the co-op and Mood each putting in £300,000, and Mood giving us the option to buy them out within the next seven years (much more detail appears in the Share Offer and Business Plan attached below).
We will then appoint a tenant sympathetic to our aims.
The £600,000 will be evenly split for the purposes of purchase and refurbishment of the Cardigan Arms.
If the co-op does not raise £200,000 we will not go ahead with the purchase and all your money will be returned.
The sale of the pub will not be concluded until June, but Greene King has called for a close of unconditional offers by April 25th. We need to evidence a weight of pledges by that date.
Cardigan Angels
All investors are important, but to reach our challenging funding target we need to pull in around 40 major investors, putting in between £5,000 and £10,000. We have created a Class A share of Cardigan Angels to achieve this and though there is always risk involved, we are confident of being able to pay 4% interest on those shares.