This Restaurant Group Is Using an Unlikely Model to Take Over London
The team behind the popular pubs Fat Badger and Pelican are expanding across the city.
A spread at the wildly popular Fat Badger in Notting Hill, the latest, but not the last, place from the Public House Group.
Photographer: The Fat BadgerTwo years ago, if you saw a story with the word “pub” in the headline, you knew the news would be bad. “What’s Really Killing Britain’s Historic Pubs?” Bloomberg asked in August 2022. Among the answers were ambitious developers, the evolving social habits of Brits and the proverbial cost of living crisis. The pressures were mounting, the reasons were numerous.
Now, in the summer of 2025, the conversation feels profoundly different. In April, Heineken announced a £40 million ($54 million) investment in UK pubs; in early August, Greene King Pub Partners announced they would invest £27 million. In London, pubs now rank as some of the city’s most popular destinations. The Knave of Clubs in Shoreditch, a revamp of a classic 1880s East London pub, has been jammed since it opened earlier this year. And then there’s the Devonshire in Piccadilly Circus, which started pulling pints of Guinness in late 2023 and now serves around 20,000 a week. (Owner Oisin Rogers just revealed a partnership with London’s cult pizza operator, Crisp, to sell pies from an old pub, the Marlborough in Mayfair.)