The Anchor Inn is a family friendly, traditional local, welcoming all ages and backgrounds. We serve home cooked meals, we have a regulars of all ages and backgrounds, the atmosphere is relaxed friendly and inclusive with many customers describing it as there second home.
The Anchor Inn has become a place where we can laugh together, celebrate together and unfortunately at times grieve together as well. This sense of belonging is priceless, and has been achieved through genuine care. For me that’s why our pub is at the heart of this community – its the people who work here and the culture we have created by connecting people and I am incredibly proud of what we have achieved.
We support the cricket club, sponsoring them so that they can continue there work with young people in the community, we work with the WI, offering them meeting spaces, support with events, we also work closely with the churches offering parking spaces and when the church was flooded we held services here, we have helped with raffle prizes, we also do recycling schemes for bras, batteries, and tin cans supporting the air ambulance service locally.
Every day for a year I opened the pub at 9am, this was so that a man with alzheimer’s could come in. I made him breakfast and coffee and sat with him so he would eat a meal every morning and have a non alcoholic drinks at least once during the day – we did not charge him for this. He is now in a nursing home and we are visiting him regularly as we know how horrible loneliness can be.
We run a monthly craft and food market for local businesses to trade and promote themselves. We only use local suppliers for dairy, meat, vegetables, etc and have worked with small batch distilleries to promote the gins and vodkas that they make.
Currently we are working with small promoters to help them get up and running with events and festivals that they’re planning. Monthly, we help with a women in business group which encourages women who work on there own to meet and discuss best practice. Every week we promote a small business on our social media -recently a new local street food van, who have just started, is using our carpark to sell his Sri Lankan street food.
I was approached by many of the suppliers we use. Using local sustainable suppliers is great and something important to me – our dairy suppliers are a group of farmers wives who got together during covid and set up a conglomerate of farmers to sell some of there supplies to the local community and not just to large shops. The butcher is a local man who has a great reputation and quality produce, we’ve had 2 veg suppliers, the first we help set up on business, helping him establish a weekly market in three of the local villages including here. Unfortunately this did not work for him and following a split with his wife he has made the decision to stop trading. We’ve recently been approached by another supplier who again is local, and having lost three of his big school contracts, he has branched out to smaller local ones we are really happy to be working with him.
Rox’s events is a man who is looking to set up an events and marketing business, who we’re supporting in establishing his business. Rumba events are a larger company again struggling in this climate to achieve the bigger venues. We are working with them while they explore scaling things down.
Saj with the Sri Lankan food truck has been struggling to find places to pitch – we are more than happy to let him try here and hopefully he will establish a bigger round out of it. Paul our fishmonger had also been looking to set up a round in this area. He drives from Grimsby as soon as the fish are caught and brings them straight to us. Paul at Guerrilla Chicken is a small batch gin and rum maker – he set up during covid and his products are amazing, James the ice cream maker at Noels ice creams using amazing local cream and milk to produce some of the best Ice cream I have ever tasted! We also have good relations with a small bookmaker and accountancy firm.
The team has taken a while to build, we peer mentor as everyone has a particular skill, and we have no supervisors therefore everyone is trained to the same level. This means we have an amazing set of skills and breadth of knowledge about beer, coffee and food that is second to non.
Our staff volunteer in the library and have spend time helping customer fill in forms, deal with the council, Personally I have helped staff get into further education, trained them as chefs, given them the chance to sit personal licenses, encouraged them to explore other interests, supported through family illnesses and bereavements, taken them on brewery tours and we have regular meetings and team building events to ensure we keep staff wellbeing a priority.
We provide space for all charities to hold events, however any inhouse fundraising goes towards providing food for our food bank. Hopefully moving forward this is something we can look at, we do currently support charity with the bra recycling, the Kegworth air ambulance with our drinks cans recycling – we have had fundraisers not organised by ourselves that have raised funds for local nursing homes and we are currently working with the cricket club to raise funds to help them get a new pavillion and changing rooms.
