“If the pub goes, the next thing is the church”: Lincolnshire estate owner’s warning to landowners

A Lincolnshire estate owner is urging fellow landowners to take matters into their own hands and run struggling rural pubs themselves - warning communities risk losing far more than just a place to drink.

Sir Jamie Benton Jones, who runs the Irnham Estate near Grantham, took over the Griffin Inn in 2019 after years of mixed success and periods standing empty.

Now, as the pub approaches its first year breaking even, he says the real value isn’t financial but social.

“If people don’t use things… they go,” he says. “The post office was the first one to go. Our little village shop… and the pub is the next thing to go.”

He believes the only way to keep them alive is for landowners to step up directly.

“You, the landowner, you need to run it,” he says. “You can’t get some clever advisor… you’ve just got to run it yourself because your community want to see you.”

Sir Jamie says being present - and part of daily life - is what keeps people coming back.

“They don’t want to see your advisor… they want to talk to you. You’re the main guy. You live on the estate. You run the estate.”

“Every day someone comes through that door and they go, ‘Oh Jamie, my father can remember your mother…’ I treasure those stories,” he says.

And he warns the consequences of losing these spaces go far beyond business.

“If the pub goes, the next thing is the church,” he says. “Then you’re just a beautiful village with no shop, no pub and no church.”

Instead, he says rural communities need places that bring people together, and landowners have a key role to play in making that happen.

“It’s trying to find the link… what we really need to be doing is bringing people together.”