Category: Latest News

Dear Residents of Bladon, Pub Shareholders, Volunteers and Pub Go-Ers!

I would like to personally thank each and every one of you for your continued support during my first month of trading as The White House.

My first month in Bladon has been an absolutely fantastic experience. I have made so many new friends, and have met so many great people! We can’t wait to open our doors again to you all again. I really have been welcomed into this fantastic community and me and my family are proud to be a part of it and proud to live in Bladon.

We have lots of new and exciting beers coming soon. We have taken this lockdown and have used it to our advantage. The beer lines have been replaced to ensure the maximum quality in every pint to better your experience. We have 5 Brand new beers being installed on a new bar giving you 14 Draught Beers to choose from, and the cellar has had a new cooler installed to keep those draught temperatures perfect!

Thank you to everyone that has been patient with me and my team this past month. The first month is always a tricky one, but it has allowed me to learn the trends of the community, the correct stock levels, food preparation levels and so on… (I’m sure the wine drinkers will understand what I mean about stock levels!). Thank you to you all for the continued feedback, we are a community pub, and listening to the community and its needs is so important to us. I welcome feedback good or bad at any time. Please if anyone ever has a concern or question just pop over and we can have a chat, or feel free to call or email (thewhitehousebladon@hotmail.com).

We have our first week of takeaways under our belt so a massive thank you to those who have continued to support us during lockdown and ordered a meal, or pint or even a pack of toilet roll- every order helps regardless of size or cost!

Events

Don’t forget the White House Quiz Saturday 14th November at 19:30 the zoom link will be posted on all platforms tomorrow at 3pm. Donations are welcomed via our ‘gofund me’ https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/thewhitehousebladon

You can join the quiz on Zoom on the following link 
https://us05web.zoom.us/j/7692773778?pwd=Y2dGemZUd3ZuMWN1SUpBdm5jNnNZUT09

Meeting ID: 769 277 3778
Passcode: TWH1

A bottle of ‘White House Red is given to the winners!

We look forward to seeing you!!

The Car Park

I would also like to use this time to address a concern in the village:

I fully understand the importance of the car park to Bladon and especially to those who collect their children at the school. I am in full support of the school and I will use the White House facilities to help the village of Bladon in any way, shape or form.

The White House must do its bit to support the community and those in it. On occasion its use has been abused by those travelling into Bladon to visit Blenheim, and this has caused us concern. Inconsiderate parking has stopped the pub bins from being collected twice now and on one occasion I was blocked in and couldn’t leave the car park to collect our son from nursery. In conjunction with the Bladon Community Benefit Society Committee, we are trying to come up with solutions for the future that will in no way negatively affect anyone who currently uses the car park for the school run. I am a firm believer in the community and the community must always come first! Please do come and have a chat with me if you ever experience any difficulties with parking.

We look forward to welcoming you all back very soon!

Kind regards,

Johnny Roberts
The White House

Can you believe it has been a month since The White House re-opened as a community pub! It has been great to see so many people enjoying themselves and using the pub again, from coffee and croissants to an evening meal and a few drinks. 

As owners of the pub, the community has an amazing opportunity to further develop the building and its surroundings.  Please click here to see some of what we would like to achieve in 2021.

It has been 15 months since our first community consultation, and after an unbelievable level of generosity from our shareholders, an amazing amount of work from our volunteers and support from many local businesses, it is with a huge sense of pride we are able to announce The White House will re-open on Friday 9th October at 10am..

Our new tenant, Johnny Roberts, will be open seven days a week and now has his own website, facebook and instagram pages where you will find all the information you need.

If you are planning a visit we highly recommend booking a table through one of the following channels:

Website: www.bladonwhitehouse.co.uk/

Telephone: 01993811288

Facebook: @thewhitehousebladon

Email: thewhitehouse@hotmail.com

After another busy week down at the White House we are rapidly progressing to meet our target opening date. Over the weekend our fantastic group of volunteers helped out with painting furniture, gardening, fencing and more cleaning. We had professional volunteers helping with plumbing, electrics, tiling, kitchen fitting and carpentry. A huge thank you to all of you!

In addition, the commercial kitchen and pub toilets have received a full professional deep clean and are now ready to go.

All that said, we still need your help! There will be another big push this weekend as we complete the transformation of the pub with a full repaint. And if you don’t fancy painting we have plenty of other jobs on the list 🙂

Please sign up on our volunteer form if you can spare some time –

Almost there!

Wow, what a difference a week makes! We have seen HUGE progress over the last seven days thanks to our army of volunteers and some local contractors. Here is an update on what’s been happening down at the Bladon Community Pub.

The Garden

The team from Nicholsons Garden Design, Landscaping and Forestry did an amazing job over two days taking down the four unsafe trees in the garden. Most of Bladon got to witness them at work, hair-raising stuff!

Even better, Nicholsons have kindly donated five new trees (fruit bearing), one more than we had to fell, as well as a collection of sleepers and over 60 plants. Thanks to our gardening volunteers we now have freshly planted beds and window boxes. Fantastic! We were also able to make use of some of the wood, as chips for the garden. The rest of the wood has gone to be chipped, providing fuel for a biomass energy plant.

Other jobs in the garden included renovating and repainting the decking at the front of the pub, moving and fitting new fencing, and sanding and painting the last of the outdoor furniture.

The Building

However, there is more to do than just the garden and the building also received some TLC. The pub chimney was fitted with a new flue liner, making it safe to operate the wood burning stove again, ready for winter. The tenant’s accommodation had a makeover, getting repainted throughout. Finally we have started work on renovating the pub interior, beginning with the furniture.

What’s Next?

Now our attention turns to the pub itself as we countdown to opening. Over the next two weeks the following jobs will be completed:

• Seeding the bare areas of the garden, finishing off the fencing and giving the gardent a final tidy
• Fitting a new kitchen to the tenant’s accommodation
• Cleaning carpets and flooring throughout
• Painting the pub – chairs, tables and front of house
• Commercial deep cleaning of the pub kitchen and toilets
• Preparation of the cellar – getting ready for beer!

Volunteers Needed!

As before, we are keeping our volunteer form updated with the time slots where we need help. Please fill in your details if you can help out.

Nearly there!

Great news, we have the exciting update that we have now appointed a tenant.  If everything goes to plan The White House will be open in early October. There is still lots to do. We need your help to get the final jobs completed so please sign up below and look out for emails and social media announcements.  It feels like all of the hard work is about to pay off!

After a very thorough recruitment process we are very pleased to announce that Johnny Roberts will be our tenant.  Johnny wanted to introduce himself, so here he is!

The last few years I have homed in on Real Ale and really bonded with the brewing community and CAMRA (campaign for real ale) here in Oxford. I’ve developed a burning passion for supporting local breweries and my hard work and passion has been on display at The Four Candles, George Street.

I remember reading the story of the Bladon Community Pub on social media and being completely inspired by the hard work and dedication from the community to save their local pub. I instantly fell in love with the idea and wanted to be a part of this fantastic project. The buzz and excitement for The White House is so inspiring and it will be an absolute pleasure to represent this great pub as the tenant alongside my Head Chef David Fowler.

We aim to create ‘more than just a pub’ at The White House, bringing the pub and the community closer together. In my opinion the pub is a very important aspect of village life, it should serve the community and be a focal point for everyone to enjoy. Creating the perfect balance is an exciting opportunity for me and my team, we will combine Café style food for the morning and afternoons with a combination of wholesome pub classics and finer dining in the evenings. But let’s not forget about the Sunday Roasts that will be a prominent feature of our menu. It’s important for me to keep things local, from the guest ales and craft beers, to the food on the menu, we pledge to keep things as local as possible wherever possible. So, if you like locally sourced meat and beers from your favourite brewers here in Oxfordshire, then I look forward to welcoming you at The White House (hopefully very soon!).”

We cannot wait to open the doors of The White House and make it a central part of Bladon life for all of the community, but we need your help. There is a lot to do to prepare The White House for opening.  Please sign up here to volunteer and keep an eye out for emails with further details.

https://bladoncommunitypub.org/volunteers-weekly

As we move steadily towards opening there are still many jobs we need to complete and we need your help! Jobs to complete include further site tidying, cleaning, painting, groundworks, light gardening, planting – basically all sorts of things needing all sorts of skills. We would love to get as many of you involved as possible, it will speed things along and also allow you to see what is happening down on site.

There are some areas where we need to bring in professionals. That means for the next few weeks we will be limiting volunteer access to site to weekends.

Every week we will post updates through email and social media on what is needed. The place to get involved is at the volunteer sign-up form which will be updated weekly. We are keeping the slots short to make them manageable, but if you have more time then feel free to sign up to multiple slots. However, please do not come to site without first getting in touch and receiving confirmation, we need to keep track of numbers and maintain safe social distancing.

This is the exciting part and we can’t wait to see you!

We have had continued interest from those that missed the chance to invest during the initial share offering. We are therefore pleased to announce that we have re-opened the share offer. The share offer will now stay open until we hit our originally specified maximum target of £515,000.

With all your great support we raised enough money to buy the pub, but there are still many improvements we would like to make to the site. Further funding will also provide us with a welcome buffer during the uncertain times that we are currently operating under. Any money invested now will be used to continue renovations as we prepare for opening or to fund future enhancements to the site.

If you want to support us via investment or donation please follow the links below.

As always, thank you!

At last the community gets the keys to the pub! Take a look around – keep in touch if you can help, still lots to do.

Thanks to pub supporters Franks Films for making this video for shareholders. Edit 11 from FRANKS FILMS on Vimeo.