Pride of the North

The Market Town Taverns are a refreshingly different kind of pub in Yorkshire, England. Barrie Pepper reports

Faced with the choice of remaining as a reasonably well-paid accountant or taking a chance and sinking most of your capital into an unestablished and therefore unproved pub company; what would you do?

Ian Fozard chose the latter. And it certainly has been a case of third time lucky for him for he had already tried his hand in the pub business.

His company, Market Town Taverns, not yet 10 years old, already has a stable of 10 pubs in Yorkshire, all within one hour’s drive of Knaresborough.

His previous entries to the pub business were not the gamble of the present one. He was one of five CAMRA members who formed Rodent Inns, then came his single ownership of Blind Jack’s, previously a shop in Knaresborough’s Market Place, which won awards and was a great success. And although he sold it after five years it still remains his local.

In the hiatus that followed Ian pondered on what next. ‘I didn’t want to run my own pub,’ he told me, ‘but I did want to be in the business and be my own boss. Suddenly it came to me. I would create a chain of pubs that would be something different. I didn’t like the so-called theme chains being set up by pub companies, there was an artificiality about them and I thought the alehouse concept was overdone. My idea was a loose theme of upping the standards.’ His agenda was simple: pubs serving high quality brasserie style food, cask conditioned beers, foreign beers, wines and with a pleasant atmosphere. There would be no-smoking areas, no canned mu.....

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By Barrie Pepper

Section : Spotlight

Page number : 50