Happy hours

At Phoenix Community Housing we seem to have a curious attraction to pubs.

Our community building and headquarters The Green Man stands on a former pub site in Downham.

And now we’ve bought another pub – The Fellowship Inn - just down the road in Bellingham, south east London.

But these are the days when housing associations are supposed to be building new homes. So just why are we concentrating some of our efforts on restoring a 1920s pub?

To answer that question, you need to look at the history of our area, the history of the pub, and the short history of Phoenix.

The Fellowship Inn was the first ever pub built on a London housing estate, designed as a meeting place for Homes for Heroes – First World War veterans starting to move into new cottage estates to escape inner city overcrowding.

At the time it caused quite a stir. News of parliamentary debates on the Fellowship Inn made it as far as the US media, with leaders of the temperance movement agonising over the possible collapse of society if working class Londoners were offered ready access to alcohol.

But ultimately the sheer size of the building won the day. It wasn’t a simple two-room boozer. Besides the bar, there was a theatre, event space, even a children’s room. It was somewhere you could take the family, keep the kids entertained.

Forty years later the Fellowship Inn enjoyed something of a golden age.

Here it was that Bellingham boy ‘Enry Cooper would train ahead of his 1963 bout with Cassius Clay. It started attracting bands: seriously good bands.

Fleetwood Mac played there twice in ‘68. We know John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and the Yardbirds also performed there, and we’re still trying to delve through the archives to find more.

All that’s left now at the Fellowship Inn is the working bar.

The rest of the building had started to fall into ruin – a symbol pretty much of what had happened across the whole of our area of south Lewisham.

At one time families could enjoy the 2000-seat Splendid Cinema, swimming at Bellingham lido, the Tiger’s Head and Green Man pubs, fairground attractions and boating at Peter Pan’s Pool.

All are gone now. And together with them went the prospects for Bellingham and neighbouring Downham, dwindling until they had become some of the most deprived wards in the UK.

No investment, poor educational attainment, few jobs, little hope. Places that few have heard of and few visit, as each hour the thousands of cars stream past them down the Bromley Road to get to Catford or Bromley, anywhere else.

“It will be a place where people can learn new skills, gain apprenticeships, find long-term employment – we expect to offer around 80 new jobs in an area of high benefit take-up.”

Yet what remained was community spirit, and out of that Phoenix was born. As Lewisham Council looked at stock transfer options, resident campaigners decided to take matters into their own hands.

They came up with the idea of a community gateway housing association, led by its residents and with residents having a genuine say on not only the future of the organisation, but also the wider future of their community.

It’s because of their voices that The Green Man is not a traditional office block for Phoenix staff, but a building with a public café, a training kitchen, a credit union and event space.

It’s because of their voices that we bought the Fellowship Inn. Because of their voices that we abandoned any idea of redeveloping the Fellowship Inn into housing.

We’re starting to build new developments, but our residents have made it abundantly clear that they want much more than just new homes.

They want somewhere to go, to meet people, to do things, to enjoy events.

They want to rebuild a community, to return some of what’s been lost over many years.

And so back to the Fellowship Inn. We’ve got big plans for the building – a cinema, a live venue, a brewery, a restaurant, a music hub with rehearsal space (we hope some of the next generation of seriously good bands will come from Lewisham).

It will be a place where people can learn new skills, gain apprenticeships, find long-term employment – we expect to offer around 80 new jobs in an area of high benefit take-up.

Ultimately we want people in our area to feel proud of where they live, and we believe the Fellowship Inn will play a huge role in that.

We also hope that the creation of the new venue will spur greater investment in our area, that it will put Bellingham back on the map.

We’re extremely grateful for the £3.8million funding support from the Heritage Lottery to make this a reality, along with the support we’ve received from Lewisham Council and many other individuals and organisations.

Over the past 12 months or so we’ve been making good the building and have now appointed an operating partner, Laine’s London.

We’re looking forward to working with them to open the new-look venue sometime in the next couple of years.

In the meantime we’ll be working with arts groups, schools and people from across the area on a range of heritage projects.

We’re excited about what we’ll uncover as we delve further into the pub’s history.

But more than anything we’re excited that the best years of the Fellowship Inn – and indeed the wider Phoenix area – may no longer lie in the past.

Jonathan Lawn, head of people services and communications, Phoenix