The Mirror has been championing the industry’s cause with its Your Pub Needs You campaign, calling for support for landlords and the communities they serve
Ed Sheeran has seemingly become the latest victim of Britain’s pub crisis.
The star’s bar and diner, Bertie Blossoms, is yet to turn a profit after struggling to survive during the Covid-19 pandemic. It comes as boozers across the UK continue to struggle, with two a day being lost.
Accounts filed in December reveal That Dive Bar Portobello, through which the pop superstar runs the business, disclosed net current liabilities of £1.3m as of December 2024. The balance sheet for the company, which he set up in 2018, discloses the firm has gone down by £763,000 since December 2021.
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And the books sent to Companies House also show the firm cut down to a staff of five during the same period – down from six the previous year and ten in 2020.
New figures published last month revealed that another 188 pubs were lost in the final three months of 2025. The vast majority – 123 – were what were classed as community pubs, including many that still rely on drinks sales to survive.
The number of food-led pubs fell by 56, along with nine high street sites, according to a report from NIQ and CGA intelligence. The NIQ data showed the number of hospitality sites across the UK fell by 382 between September and December, down to 98,914, equivalent to more than four net closures per day. More than 240 restaurants of different types closed in the past three months.
The Mirror has been championing the industry’s cause with its Your Pub Needs You campaign, calling for support for landlords and the communities they serve. Experts say radical action is needed to hold back the tide of closures, which has seen more than 2,000 lost since the start of 2020.
Sheeran, reportedly worth £300m, bought Bertie Blossoms in 2019 and named it in honour of his wife Cherry Seaborn and his manager Stuart Camp’s partner Liberty Shaw. He took two months off making music to oversee renovations at the two-storey building, in Notting Hill, West London, but had to temporarily shut it during the pandemic.
Things got so bad that, in a bid to attract takeaway orders during the lockdowns, it offered half-price white wine on Deliveroo. He also closed it again at the start of last year for a major refurbishment, which included a new kitchen, before reopening it last February.
Suffolk-based Sheeran previously told how Bertie Blossoms was originally going to be a chicken shop takeaway and had struggled to survive during the health crisis. He admitted: “I bought a building and I was meant to make it into a fried chicken shop. That fell through and then I thought, what the f*** do I do with this building?
“And then my manager suggested that we start a pub together and that’s literally the reason.” He added: “If you’re looking to make a small fortune in the food industry you should start with a large fortune. It’s one of these things where, unless you’re Jamie Oliver or Gordon Ramsay and you have loads of restaurants, it’s very difficult.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: mirror.co.uk
