Back from the brink: The Wolverhampton pub where customers are friends
As pubs struggle in the current cost of living crisis, the Express & Star continues its series, Love Your Local, which celebrates our local inns.
It's a community hub which has veered on the brink of closure, but is looking to a brighter future.
The Keg and Comfort pub in Oxley has had more than its fair share of growing pains over the last five years, surviving a global pandemic, only to be hit by a cost of living crisis which threatened its very existence.
However, as 2023 comes to an end, owners Louise and John Clive have kept the pub open and begun to build a new customer base after seeing previous award success as cider pub of the year for Wolverhampton in 2018 and 2020.
The pub was opened in 2018 after the couple took over the building, which has previously been a Barclays bank, and began the process of turning it into what Louise Clive described as a "community hub, not just a boozer".
She explains: "We opened up in 2018 and we made quite a big thing about the fact that we wanted it to be a community pub.
"It's somewhere for everyone, obviously, but particularly the people in the local area to meet up with other people in the area, get to know them and feel comfortable, which is why we called it the Keg and Comfort.
"We thought about that very carefully and what we have done is very much follow the ethos of a micro-pub as we have no screens, no gaming machine and no lagers and while we have slightly evolved over the years, we've always done what we've needed to do to keep our customers and get new ones."
