Beloved Brandon Hotel to remain as is

Concern has been growing among the Carlton North community after local pub the Brandon Hotel was spotted for sale on a real estate website.

Fortunately, it has been confirmed by both the real estate agent and publicans, the pub’s lease holders, that the Brandon Hotel will remain in business as per usual.

“What is for sale is the actual building itself, so our landlords have made the decision to sell the building they have owned for more than 50 years,” current Brandon Hotel co-publican Prue Grant said.

“Both myself and Andrew Boreham [co-publican] still own the leasehold to operate the pub and we have a current lease in place to operate the business for another 10 years.”

Both Andrew and Prue have been an integral part of the running of the Brandon Hotel for many years, with Andrew starting in 2006 and Prue in 2014.

It is through this time they have been able to see the incredible strength of the Carlton North community coming together to support businesses in the area during the pandemic.

“We consider ourselves so incredibly lucky every single day to be a part of this community and the past couple of years has only just cemented this and made it even clearer to us,” Prue said.

Following their reopening to business as usual, both Prue and Andrew have found themselves overwhelmed by the number of people coming through the doors, resulting in them having to “increase staff numbers”.

Now with the selling of the Brandon Hotel being public knowledge they also want to stress that the community can rely on them for the same service.

“We don’t see the pub changing in any way significantly to what its current offering is to the community, and we certainly don’t want to destroy any of that good will and do anything dramatically to it,” Prue said.

“We want to be a place that people can come to, recognise, feel comfortable in and be part of that heartbeat of what is happening in the neighbourhood.”

The reason the business owners are departing after 50 years has been unknown to Prue and Andrew.

But following further enquiries by Inner City News into the reason for selling, it has been confirmed that the decision to sell the family business comes from the family simply wanting to move on.

An auction for the Lee St building is scheduled for Thursday, July 14 with two open inspections having already been conducted at the time of publishing. •