Lynton and Barnstaple - Operations and Development

I recall hearing several years ago that the price was between £700 and £800,000, so if the current asking price quoted on a previous post is correct, it will require a lot of profit to finance the purchase price. It will have shades of the problems the old L & B Company had, which in early years had to borrow the money from Newnes in January to pay the 6-monthly debenture interest due on 1st of that month, making a good deal of the profit during the summer months. The Company could never afford to repay him, so he was issued with (further) debentures instead of cash. With such a large sum, and with a bank loan being talked about to supplement contributions by shareholders surely the site has to have been mortgaged to provide security. So, in that situation, who owns the site - the Blackmoor Company or one of the Railway bodies and what the relationship is between the two bodies - is critical to the risk that a failure of the pub will take the railway with it, or at least force the sale of the pub to an outside owner. I am sure if this risk exists it has weighed heavily, and I hope it has been ameliorated.

With regard to the alleged competition from other eating outlets I do not recall another venue between Lynton and the Junction with the Link Road (where there is a facility on the roundabout), apart maybe from Woody Bay Station, and the Fox and Goose in Parracombe, which village most potential customers bypass, so the 'passing trade' is an enormous asset.

 

Must have been a good few years ago. In 2017, the estimated purchase price was £1.75 Million, but I don't know what has been agreed. Not unrealistic IMHO either, as you'd be buying both the land/buildings and a going concern.

 

My concern is primarily about the price (undisclosed, even to potential investors), the accounts and the business plan. In sum, the lack of information being offered to investors meant that when my questions weren't answered, I decided not to make a (modest) investment.

For the record I asked the following:

I'm concerned that a figure north of £1.5m for OHSI* seems too high. If I was looking at this dispassionately, given the lack of accounts and the responses on Tripadvisor, I'd have to assume that the value of the business isn't high, and that this a property purchase pure and simple. It's interesting that the Fox and Goose in Parracombe is on the market for £635k and is top rated in Parracombe on TripAdvisor. The OHSI is number 60 in the same list, bottom of page 2. Especially in light of the cost of living crunch, I'd want to see the accounts before committing to a valuation on the OHSI pub section of the proposition.

What this leaves us with is a property valuation. Beneath the (sadly unsympathetic) additions for the pub, the Swiss chalet outlines of the original Blackmoor station are clear, which like Woody Bay is a remarkable survivor nearly a century after closure. Next to it is a six bedroom house, so the question is how much is the house worth, and how much is the land worth? The actual L&B Building may not actually be all that valuable if the pub isn't worth much. If we're being generous and value the OHSI business the same as the Fox and Goose, then at £1.75m, the house and the land are supposedly worth £1.15m, which compares poorly with this in Parracombe for £645k (though sadly on the wrong side of the A39 and not offering the key bit of trackbed). Notably, this one was reduced in price in September, though it doesn't say by how much. In any event, a price that seemed reasonable even six months ago seems harder to sustain now given the rises in mortgage rates and considerably worse medium term economic outlook.

I'd be surprised if a fair market price for OSHI was much more than £1m - and that's generously assuming that the business was half as valuable as the Fox and Goose and that the house plus eight acres is worth the same as 14 acres with much better views up in Parracombe. It seems to me that the either the price needs to come down to reflect the market, or that we knowingly overpay for the whole thing in order to secure the station, with a view to seeing if the business is viable - and if not, then to close the OHSI down, and return the station to as close as possible to the 1935 condition. This wouldn't preclude converting the house into a museum-cum-volunteer accommodation, but it would remove the risk of the business failing from the equation.

*This should of course be OSHI, but it was late when I typed this up.

I never received an answer.

 

Who is suggesting that? The various organisations in the L&B family have a collective aim of restoring most of the original railway route. As steps towards that they are acquiring sections of the route as and when they can. The business prospects for any business in the hospitality sector are not brilliant at present, but it's surely better to acquire OSHI as a business than as a few buildings with no immediate use. It will need to generate enough cash to cover the interest on the bank loan, though the presently rising rate of inflation will help by slowly reducing the effective debt. The hope is that it will generate enough profit to pay the shareholders some dividends and eventually to buy them out, but surely no-one expects it to subsidise rebuilding the railway.

 

Check posts 6082 and 6087

 

You are right the pub by itself is never going to generate enough money to rebuild the railway, we know that, as Mellish has pointed out this is a collective rebuilding of the railway and Blackmoor as the plan states is to be the new centre of operations. It will be up to the L&BR group to make the most of all the assets it has under the one umbrella.

Besides no one has yet brought up the subject of how the railway is to get under the road junction to Lynton and who and how is it going to be paid for?

 

I promise you now , as a local ...ill be objecting to all your crap ideas about what to do with blackmoor.

It's a pub for locals and that's how it should stay , a country pub. It works as it is and keeps people employed and the locals watered.

I refuse to have a museum or any other strange dam idea you have walking past me while I'm trying to have a meal.

 

Obviously haven't read anything on the L&B website or the planning portals.

Everything has been laid out excatly how it's going to be done , everything is priced up and everything has been surveyed

I have no idea who you are but I can only assume your a local who wants to see it all fail judging by your negative attitude

 

Welcome Small Prairie you should read my reply about how long I have been a member.

Trust me I have seen and read the plan and asked questions and no I am not from North Devon. If I wanted this project to fail I wouldn't still be a life member. I am just saying we need to have some caution about all of this. I don't want to be the one to say I told you so.

But there is no harm in looking toward the future and seeing what can happen.

Besides I have invested money in to LYN so I am not going anywhere soon.

I am sorry but it will be down to the investors and the site owners who decide what they want to do with Blackmoor not you or I.

 

Paying customers tend to have a determining voice in the success of businesses. Going against those customers is usually a route to failure.


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Exactly - there is so much speculation on here and it is clear that some who comment have not looked at the proposals for the Pub and the House and where the line will be re-instated.

 

I was wondering just how many folk on this forum went to the members forum over the last weekend you would have got a very good idea of what is going on.

 

As a member, I am curious but would expect to hear about it in the members area of the website -= not on an open forum such as this.

 

Had a message back from Peter Miles saying they are not going to put anything up on the members only part of the website as there was a discussion on subjects that was to sensitive

 

Hmmm.... surely there must have been something said at the meeting that can be reported to the wider membership, otherwise why have a meeting at all ?

 

I am sure that is the case. Again I would say that I would expect the information to be made available in the members area of the website or in a newsletter in due course and not on an open forum such as this or the Facebook pages.

 

Don't hold your breath, as to when was the last time you had any real news from North Devon in the magazine? I get to know more from here and the e groups

 

Agreed, but if you start to change something to make it more attractive to the tourist market, as it will be. The local's lose out which is something that is not lost on me, despite what Small Prairie might think of me.

In around about way we both want to keep it as it is but at the same time it has to be restored to a state where the tourist traffic will want to come to eat and drink. I know about pubs losing that local feeling as I had a great one at the bottom of my road, wonderful, then the brewery decided to turn it in to a yuppie pub, about three years later it has changed again not back to a local but close.

It is just as important to keep what I would term the local business bar open (I think it is still open early on market days?) if that means having two bars one for all the local trade plus the pool table which is a must (and who doesn't like having a game of pool now and then) and one for the tourist trade then so be it, after all, it will have to be a long term ambition if that is to happen.

 

Am I missing something ? The sale brochure of Blackmoor Station in 1938 recorded the oblong site on which it stood as 2 acres and few odd perches, and that included the stables, which being non-pub residential property I assume are not included in what it is proposed to acquire. But perhaps the field on the west side of the line makes up the difference. The land, originally acquired by the L & B Company in March 1897 came to just over 8 acres, but that included the trackbed back to the Heddon Stream half way round Holwill (ie. Parracombe) embankment.

 

A few years back I was involved with the purchase and installation of a 23m turntable. Annoyingly, just as we were getting close to a deal with the owners, someone removed the two electric motors and gear boxes and took them to another location. When we finally found out where, they had already been skipped. Now what?

Then a member told us about an identical turntable that, this very week, was being cut up for scrap on site by a scrappie. We raced there with a lorry and HIAB. The motors and gear boxes were still there! We offered the scrappie a fair market scrap value, but to our fury he wanted much, much more.
'Hey, that isn't fair, they're not worth that much', we wailed.
'Ah', he went, 'but you want them....'