Background
About
Houses the family keeps, and the question of who keeps them next.
Most of what the family has is in those buildings.
Ellingham Inns is the family name over the inns we keep. Each one is a house with rooms above, a bar and a kitchen below, and the freehold in the family's name. We are not a group with a head office: my sister runs the kitchens, my mother still comes in on Sundays, and most of the people who work in the houses have been there longer than I have been back.
I came back to the inns after years of doing something else, which means I arrived at the paperwork late. Most of what the family has is in these buildings. My brother has started asking what happens if I am not here to answer the phone, and the honest answer is that nobody has written it down. Nothing is for sale and nothing is running — I am reading up on what handing a place like this over actually takes, and looking for somebody who has watched it done.
How it got here
From one leaking roof to a family of inns
The first house came into the family as a pub with a leaking roof and no kitchen to speak of.
We stopped letting the kitchens out and put our own people in them.
Another inn came up in the next valley and we took it on rather than watch it turn into flats.
We bought the buildings we were already keeping, so the family owned what it looked after.
The houses are ours, the family is larger, and the question of who signs for them next is being asked out loud.
The question I keep asking
Who signs for the houses next, and what does that actually take?
If you have been through it, or are going through it, write. Nothing to prepare, no obligation.
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