MY PUB: The Walton Village, Walton-on-Thames, Surrey

This Urban Village Pubs site has a bit of everything going on in a commuter town and can rightly be home to young revellers, families, dogs, craft beer aficionados and even movie buffs.

Here, general manager Ned Clarke tells The Morning Advertiser all about the Walton Village pub.

The pub

The pub sits on a bustling high street in the commuter town of Walton-on-Thames in Surrey. It is surrounded on all sides by fast food and casual dining sites plus estate agents.

From the outside, it’s got a blend of “hey that looks like a cosy place” and “let go here on a Friday night as they may play the occasional noughties house banger”.

It’s hard to describe but it’s soft, casual and inviting. We don’t have a garden (yet?) but have some cosy tables and chairs outside.

In the summer, we can fling open the bi-fold doors and the whole front of the pub opens up. It looks properly lovely. Speaking of the windows - I am still getting over the fact that we recently lost the local Christmas window painting competition.

Having won (as a company) the Community Pub Operator of the Year at The Publican Awards 2023, then the local CAMRA Pub of the Year award, we had our hearts set on the window competition. Alas, we can but try again next year.

Inside, we have cosy separatable room at the back called The Village Hall, which is 100% free for the community to book as use as they want (within reason, obviously). We have business meetings, ping pong tournaments and dinner parties in there.

In the middle of the site is The Dog Pub. This area has free water, biscuits, bedding and toys for our canine friends. Underneath the dog pub is the subwoofer for the pub’s sound system. Nobody has quite figured out how funny this is yet, though.

We try not to take ourselves too seriously. Pubs should be a bit funny and silly. We have a faux living wall with a neon sign stating: “Surrey not Sorry”, which kind of sums it up.

We celebrate sports but certainly not in a ‘sports bar’ way – not that there is anything wrong with that, it’s just not quite our tempo. We show major events on most screens and reserve commentary for really big games. We have HD TVs that are viewable from most seats. When we’re not showing sports, we showcase local photography on the screens so they don’t form a black hole on the walls.

The publican

I took eight years off being a landlord to be head of learning and development for a certain large canine-related UK craft brewery. Coming back into the GM fold was amazing, fun, humbling, brutal and an incredible adventure.

I’m a big old beer nerd and have been since cutting my teeth on the Bristol Real Ale scene in the noughties. I’m also a big fan of feeding and watering people – which is lucky because I run a pub.

Managing the Walton Village and helping develop its team is the absolute highlight of my career.

I’m still very much involved in the L&D side of things and three days a week help the wider company with training compliance, culture, comms, talent and succession planning. In order for this to be possible my amazing deputy GM Stan Luker mans the oars back at the pub.

In my spare time, I am chairman of the local business improvement district group, run the local PubWatch and spend time on my allotment with my wonderful fiancé Julie and our little doggy Ralph.

The trade

As with most Urban Village pubs, we have a broad age range of customers aged between 18 and 80.

Our pubs champion inclusivity and community. There really is a something for everyone vibe. On a Friday night at 8pm, you will see families with doggies and kids having dinner, young hipsters drinking craft beer, couples enjoying wine, parties in the back rooms and locals dotted around the pub throughout.

We pay particular attention to making families, kids and dogs feel really welcomed at the pub. The whole company is extraordinary in its support of the local community and that describes our trade better than anything else.

It’s that one pub in town every knows exactly what they are going to get: warmth, safety, friendliness, tolerance, inclusivity and cheer. It can get a bit spicy on Friday nights from 10pm though as the younger crowd come out in their droves the take advantage of our house cocktails deal and listen to those noughties bangers I mentioned.

The team

We are a very tight team and act as one with most front-of-house team being cross-trained to work in the kitchen and vice-versa.

We house 17 human workers and one small dog (the aforementioned Ralph) who occasionally helps clear chips from under tables.

The management structure is GM (myself), deputy GM (Stan), assistant manager (Tania), head chef (Callum) and three supervisors (James, Fanni and Katie).

I’ve always believed in having about half my team in management positions (for teams under 20 in size) because it encourages personal growth and responsibility among young people.

The leadership meet every Monday morning at 8am to discuss the previous week’s business and computer games over a coffee… mainly computer games.

Building the team here into a stable unit took a heap of work but over the past year or so, we have really come into our element. It is a rare thing to feel so unified and comfortable with your coworkers and it feels amazing, like we are all pulling in the same direction.

The drink

We have a good range of wines, softs and spirits for a local business but I guess it is our beer range and cocktails that we are famous for.

We have a heap of big brands but also have six ever-rotating craft beers on the craft beer wall on the back bar.

A good proportion of our customers commute to London and love coming home to London-style hipster beer at Surrey prices. Our premium cocktails also fly out. They are no-frills easy peasy and, at the time of writing this, all under a tenner. Nothing is ‘cheap’ these days but I believe our prices are pretty chill for inside the M25.

The food

Pizzas, burgers and chicken, that’s us.

Our pizzas are all made fresh from our open kitchen. Kids often line up to watch the chefs flipping pizzas from the railing by table 25.

The town has gone absolutely bonkers for our buttermilk fried chicken so we’ve had to expand the menu to keep everyone happy.

Our chefs enjoy working in an open kitchen and have become accustomed to very busy services. We trade from 10am to 9pm every day in that kitchen so it takes quite the beating.

We treat our pizza oven and Rational oven like they are sports cars. I mean, they cost about the same…

The events

On Mondays, we turn the back room into a cinema by curtaining it off. We have a licence to show movies for free and the locals love it. We even offer popcorn. We do themed movie nights every month. January was The Little Mermaid when we were doing free face painting for the kids, a bubble machine and a deal on fish burgers.

During the day on Wednesdays, we host Baby Brunch Club where young parents bring their nippers in to socialise. We put play mats and bean bags down, as well as bags of little toys. There are changing facilities and we create a buggy park in the side room. We put a Disney film on the screen and provide free filtered water too. We have had such incredible feedback from the community and it makes me so proud to work for a company that has allowed me to run with such a loopy idea. It’s a very wholesome Wednesday morning here at the Walton Village.

On Thursdays, we have a walloping great pub quiz hosted by this amazing dude called Duncan who looks like an ageing Ibiza DJ. It’s really something and gets booked up months in advance. We also have a hot wings competition where people have to beat the fastest time to eat 10 Carolina Reaper slathered wings. The sauce we use is absolutely brutal and will put most hotheads to the test.

Twice a year we have beer, wine, whisky and cheese festivals with guided tastings run by myself. My former globetrotting career as a certified beer nerd has put me in good stead to sit with large groups and rant about food and drinks pairings. We put bunting throughout the pub, work with local drinks producers and a brilliant local cheesemonger called Green & Lovely.

The future

When I started running pubs in the early 2000s, you needed four things to make money: an open door, clean glasses, lots of pound coins and a cellar full of beer. Today’s market is wild, challenging, ever-mutating and a bit unstable. The amount of effort we put into being ahead of the market curve is insane but it’s what keeps us busy each day. We run deals and events every day, we innovate with our drinks and food ranges, we innovate with our approach to families and the community and we try really hard to retain all the things that make a pub a pub.

This year sees even tougher challenges on the industry but we feel confident and ready. We have software for at-seat ordering, PoS, bookings, CRM, ordering and stock management, compliance, takeaway deliveries and labour management. Each of these takes the strain off some of the day to day while providing insights into how we can tighten up areas of the business. We have an awesome social media team (from within) that produce fun and engaging content that sends a message to our current and future customers that we are alive, buzzing and full of ideas.

We will need to be as nimble and creative as ever to keep people interested this year – our toughest challenge yet.

Specifically, we are looking into improving our games offer with interactive darts, arcade games and a range of table-top games. We need to be really smart about deploying this idea because it will take away some tables so there will need to be a very strong marketing plan in place to match this.

We’re going to grow and grow our festivals, in particular, getting the tastings pre-booked and making sure that we are expanding the offer to bring even more people in.

We are going to continue to develop our hot wings nights and competitions, making food as fun and engaging as we possibly can.

We are going to keep pushing our guest and craft beers, helping the good people of Walton explore the world of beer from their doorstep.

We’d like to expand our cocktails offering and start hosting more tasting events.

We’re also keen to launch a dog menu for the hounds. On the team front, we are planning on putting a few of our team through hospitality apprenticeships…

…oh, and we WILL win that window decoration competition.