News / Barton Hill
New campaign hopes to reopen historic pub
A new campaign is aiming to raise enough money to save a historic pub and bring it back to life as a community hub for the area, and a new music and arts venue for Bristol.
The Save the Rhubarb campaign hopes to save the Rhubarb Tavern in Barton Hill, with a crowdfunder launched to raise the money needed to renovate the damaged building.
The campaign has been set up by Tara Clerkin and Sunny Paradisos from the band Tara Clerkin Trio.
“We’ve played in almost every kind of establishment there is, and it was seeing these places while on tour that really inspired us to think about what was missing from the pub scene in Bristol and the creative sector in the UK,” Tara and Sunny say.
“We want to combine our favourite parts of the traditional British boozer with the community-centred creative spaces we’ve found in bars and venues abroad.”
With the Rhubarb getting a reprieve from developers, Tara and Sunny hope to run the pub on Queen Ann Road as not-for-profit community interest company “and re-open as a real ‘public house’, not just for drinking but a space the whole community can use – a place for music, community groups, workshops and affordable food as well as all the things we love about pubs”.
Their initial target of £35,000 is the bare minimum needed to get the Rhubarb fixed up and in working order, with Tara and Sunny saying “beyond that we will be able to keep expanding and making it better”.
When they visited the Rhubarb in 2018, beer writers Boak & Bailey wrote that it was “a rare survivor – an old backstreet pub that hasn’t gentrified or closed down, where locals still drink”.
Inside the Rhubarb Tavern in 2019 – photo: Bristol24/7
The Rhubarb is Barton Hill’s oldest building still standing today having been built in the 18th century as a farmhouse. The road the tavern is located on is now known as Queen Ann Road but was originally called Pottery Lane, named after Barton Hill Pottery, which once stood next to the pub, which closed in 2020.
To find out more and donate to the crowdfunder, visit www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/save-the-rhubarb-tavern-bristol
Main photo: Save the Rhubarb
Read next:
- Pub of the Week: The Rhubarb Tavern
- Residents fight to prevent another pub from being turned into flats
- 11 things you probably didn’t know about Barton Hill
Listen to the latest Bristol24/7 Behind the Headlines podcast:
Our newsletters emailed directly to you
