Features / Breakfast with Bristol24/7
Breakfast with Bristol24/7: Marc Griffiths & Patrick Daly
On a night out in Bristol, you’d be hard-pressed not to come across a World Famous Dive Bars venue.
Started in 2007 with the Mother’s Ruin on St Nicholas Street, the group now operates nearby bar and venue the Crown, the Greyhound in Fishponds, the Colosseum in Redcliffe and the revived Croft on Stokes Croft.
The team have also recently acquired the Good Chemistry brewery and taproom, rapidly expanding their beer-based empire.
Following our meeting, the team revealed they had bought a Grade II-listed former Indian restaurant in the Old City too.
Just around the corner from their latest brewing endeavour in St Phillip’s, I met World Famous Dive Bars’ directors Marc Griffiths and Patrick Daly for coffees at Mokoko on New Kingsley Road.
Once settled, we dived into chatting about their recent expansions, strains on the hospitality industry and the constantly-changing beer game.
“Having Good Chemistry has been a really big one for us,” said Marc.
“We were looking at a potential brewery before Covid, but obviously as Covid kicked in we had to make cuts where we could.
“But having a brewery has definitely been in the back of our minds for five or six years now.”
The team shared that they’d come close to sealing the deal a number of times, but it had never quite happened until now.
“We were always on the hunt for a local one, to be honest,” Marc continued. “Bristol’s got such a vibrant beer scene and we didn’t even think that was going to be available to us.”
Patrick echoed this, sharing that “it’s been an ambition of ours for a while and one we’ve actually ticked off!”
Balancing the brewery with the operation of their pubs and venues, the duo explained, gives them a unique perspective of the demands and trends of the beer industry in the city.
“Because of where we’re operating, we’re right in the centre of town. You know, we see a lot of people every week, so we actually have a bit more insight than if we were just brewing,” said Marc.
“I think we’ve seen a much more social aspect to drinking right now,” continued Patrick, “much more than we have in a long time.”
Marc nodded in agreement, adding: “It can be more about what the drink gives to you in a social way, just like us having coffee now.
“You know, it’s less status-driven in itself as an object. It’s more status-driven around the feeling it might produce in a group of friends.”
In the World Famous Dive Bars’ pubs and venues, Marc and Patrick have thoughtfully calibrated the balance of appealing to multiple demographics at once – from regulars and quiz attendees to first-year students on intense nights out.
“There’s a space for everyone at the table,” said Patrick, “no matter who they are. I think that’s what we want to promote the most is that the environment we’ve cultivated is a safe one and everyone kind of respects that.”
However, recent increases in fees, utilities and tariffs on pubs and bars have rocked the stability of the hospitality industry.
“There’s a large correction going on at the moment in our industry and it’s not a great one,” said Marc. “The joy of an owner-operator pub is that they’re community pubs. They’re run by and for the people that use them. But, that style of pub is leaving us. I feel heartbroken for them.”
“Sadly it’s just the basic maths behind it,” agreed Patrick, punctuating with sips of his coffee.
“If pub rates go up by £40,000 in a year, that’s at least one person’s annual wages gone in an instant, which in reality means we’re going to lose a lot of pubs.
“And, more than that, they’ll never reopen as pubs, because no one is going to have the money or the time that it needs to break even, let alone turn a profit.”
“We’re going to have to find a lot more money next year just to stand still. It’s not great for staff, it’s not great for us or for the business,” Marc added.
Looking around the bustling coffee shop, he tells me that he thinks a large part of the issue is due to the UK’s attitude towards the hospitality sector.
“Hospitality is a hard place to be,” he said. “It’s a hard job. But it’s seen as a stopgap.
“There’s a cultural narrative for hospitality in this country that it can only be low pay, low earnings, and so people don’t treat it with the same respect that they do in other parts of the world.”
According to the Music Venue Trust, Marc adds, 6,000 jobs were lost in music venues alone in 2025.
“If there were 6,000 jobs lost in the car industry in 2026, the government would be wading in with a multi-million pound ‘we’ll get you out of this’ package,” he continued. “They’re not going to do that for hospitality.”
Despite increasing pressures on the hospitality industry, the future for Bristol’s pub scene is not entirely bleak.
Marc and Patrick said they hope that World Famous Dive Bars can support and preserve some of Bristol’s community pubs, and are doing what they can to ensure that the city’s pub culture and community spaces don’t get lost.
This article originally appeared in Bristol24/7’s March/ April 2026 magazine
Illustration: Lucy J Turner
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