An award-winning folk venue in a month to fight for its survival as it scrambles to pay £99,000 in backdated rent from the pandemic. The Harrison Pub has until September 17 to find the funds to save the venue after being instructed to pay its landlords the full rent for the property during the - when the pub was forced to close due to restrictions in place at the time. The 20-year-old pub was locked in a four-year battle with its landlords, the Wellington Pub Company, over the rent payments but has been asked to pay just shy of six figures following a High Court battle.
The pub’s landlord Paul Michelmore said: “As you can imagine, the whole process has been pretty hard to swallow.” He told the Standard: “When I took the pub over Harrison Street was full of prostitutes and junkies. “The only reason cars aren’t robbed every single day on Harrison Street is because we are there making it a nice place to be.
“If we shut, it would be drug dealing central. That would be full of junkies all day, all night. “We are the only place where everybody mixes from the Bengali boys to the old white geezers from the estate who have lived there from the 1920s.
“Or the solicitors and lawyers who come and work in London, the students at SOAS, all these people mix together next to each other - 18-year-old to 80-year-old. White, black, gay, straight. “That’s the beautiful thing, that’s why pubs are important.
They are the only point where all these polarised communities mee.