Save the Black Horse

The last pub in Dry Drayton has closed and is under threat of development. As a community, we’re working hard to save it.

It’s Beer Festival week in Cambridge. Suddenly official work takes a back seat compared to the importance of drinking, serving and appreciating fine beer in the sunshine. It’s great that the volunteers behind the bar include friends, colleagues, customers, suppliers and the occasional former MP.

However, for 51 weeks of the year the Cambridge Beer Festival isn’t operating and beer lovers among us have to go to a more humble establishment, the pub. Cambridge City is blessed with multiple excellent pubs, but occasionally it’s nice to take a visit to the outlying villages.

So we were very saddened to hear that the only pub in Dry Drayton, the Black Horse, was due to close. However, a community group has started assembling plans to turn it into a community pub on a similar model to the excellent Dykes End in Reach. They asked us to help with setting up their on-line presence. Mythic Beasts fully support the effort to have lovely pubs within walking and cycling distance so we’ve provided a Managed WordPress site to help their campaigning efforts. Today we’ll share a beer with them in the Beer Festival, and in the near future we hope to take a field trip to their re-opened countryside pub.

Update: They reported last night they’ve had a lot of signups to their newsletter and several interested investors. It looks like we’re going to be part of a successful pub rescue!