All the little things

Lavery’s is a name that’s been well known across the hospitality trade in Belfast for generations. Now, following recent refurbishment, the Bradbury Place venue is looking shinier than ever. Bernard Lavery has been talking to Russell Campbell…

It’s no exaggeration to say that Lavery’s bar on Belfast’s busy Bradbury Place has become an institution in the city.

While other venues have come and gone over the years, this family-owned concern has shrugged off the challenge of the Troubles and the economic decline of recent years to establish itself as a favourite destination among city drinkers of all ages.

Lavery’s is believed to have begun life as a coaching inn – the first stop for travellers on the Belfast to Dublin coach route after they’d left Carrickfergus. In those days, it was known as Kinahan’s and the present owners of the premises have been able to trace its history right back to 1854

The Lavery name has been above the door at Bradbury Place since 1917, when Patsy Lavery – great-grandfather to the venue’s present director, Bernard – bought the business from the Kinahan brothers.

Bernard recalls that when he was a child, the old stables from coach house days were still in existence at the back of the premises. By that time, they were being used for storage and each of the horse boxes was piled high with stocks of drink.

At its height, the Lavery family business encompassed more than 30 premises in locations all over Northern Ireland. In the years after the First World War, however, stock shortages led to closures and by the time the Second World War had come and gone, only five premises remained in the group, then under the control of Bernard’s grandfather, Patrick and his uncles Tom, Charlie and Donal.

As time wore on, death duties and the worsening of community relations in Northern Ireland took their inevitable toll and by the early 70s, only Lavery’s in Belfast remained in the family’s hands – and even it was not immune to the devastation that the Troubles wrought. It was attacked and burned out in 1972, the blaze almost claiming the life of Bernard’s uncle Tom, who lived in rooms above the bar.

“We were lucky to get him out alive,” recalls Bernard (49).

In the late 70s, the foundations for Lavery’s as most people know it today were laid when the Bradbury Place bar finally came into the hands of Bernard’s father – also known as Patsy – and his uncle Charlie.

“To be perfectly honest with you, I thought that they were taking on a massive headache at the time,” concedes Bernard. “There were very few people coming into the town centre in those days because of the Troubles and it was difficult to see a future for the place.”

Bernard recalls that in 1979, Danny Rice, who now owns the Old Inn at Crawfordsburn, had offered to buy the bar from the Lavery family, but the offer was refused.

“I think it was probably pig-headedness that caused that,” he adds. “The bar had been in the family for a very long time by that stage and I think that they just didn’t want to part with it.”

The success of the modern venue can probably be traced to around 1979, as Patsy and Charlie began to act on their belief that it was customer service and an all-encompassing offering that would secure the future of the premises.

“Charlie was a great front man and my father was a great grafter behind the bar,” says Bernard. “They just got down to it and started to build on the trade that they had.”

Minor adjustments and improvements to the bar had been carried out throughout the 40s and 50s. A back bar, known as The Cobbles, was introduced at that time and it subsequently became famous as the first pub in the country to welcome women as customers.

The first major renovations of the modern era began in the early 1980s after Tom had been persuaded to vacate his accommodation on the first floor. The Middle Bar was created on the first floor, the Attic Bar was added at the top of the building and kitchen facilities were added, allowing Lavery’s to being offering food for the first time.

For many years, of course, Lavery’s has been known as a popular haunt among students, many of them from Queen’s University nearby and Bernard agrees that part of the reason behind the bar’s successful rejuvenation has been the students’ patronage:

“We’re close to QUB and as people started to venture out again at the end of the 70s and into the 80s, they began to come further down the road towards us and we started to capitalise on that,” adds Bernard, who is now a director in the family business along with Charlie’s son, David Lavery. “I think we’ve always had a reputation for being a little alternative. Students are into their music and we’ve tried to cater for that, for example, whereas I think venues like the Bot and the Eg probably appeal more to those people who enjoy rugby and Gaelic.”

Eventually, it became necessary to expand again and the family bought the former Marlowe’s Cleaners next door, which they knocked down. That allowed them to expand sideways up the street and they built a three-storey extension, allowing the bars and kitchen space to grow and several new offices were added upstairs.

The last refurbishment took place in November when around £1.2m was invested to install another bar, The Woodworkers, which was named after a DIY store of the same name that stood at the site on Bradbury Place about 30 years ago.

Lavery’s very impressive upstairs pool hall was also extended – it now accommodates 22 tables – another bar was added at the rear of the hall and three, large custom-built smoking areas were installed. On a Saturday evening, 17 of those tables are wheeled out and the room becomes a nightclub for the evening:

“The trick is that you have to appeal to everyone, you can’t afford to cut any group out,” says Bernard. “That’s why our customers are 18 to 90 in here.

“You just need to keep reinventing yourself and you need to be doing everything, you need the food offering and you need to have great staff. We have a total of 180 staff in here now all told and we do a lot of outside bars, we do the Christmas market, we’ll be doing the Tall Ships when they come and we do all the corporate bars for the North-West 200.”

Lavery’s faces the same hurdles as everyone else in the trade at present: Bernard is concerned by rising costs and angered by the recent 289 per cent hike in his business rates – it’s a fine balance, he says, between how much of those costs you can pass on to customers and how much they will impact on the business.

But as for the future, he hopes to maintain current levels of activity a Lavery’s and at The Pavilion on the Ormeau Road, which the family bought in 1996.

“I don’t think much will change here in the next couple of years,, I hope we will stay as busy as we are now and that we can maintain our staff numbers,” he tells LCN. “But I don’t think we’ll be doing any more development on either of these sites. If we grow, then I think it will be somewhere completely new.”