Pastry Giant Bids for Village Pub Lease, Promises "Largest Warm Object in Southern England"
A LEASE FOR SALE sign went up outside a Haddenham pub recently, and by Thursday the village had been informed, via a laminated A1 board bolted to the pub's own hanging basket, that the building has been earmarked as the national flagship of a bakery chain known chiefly for selling hot cylinders to people at bus stops.
The proposal, submitted to Haddenham parish under the working title MEGABAKE ONE, would gut the lounge bar, the snug and the skittle alley to create what the applicant's documents describe as "the largest continuously heated retail floor in Buckinghamshire", with an academy that will train a new generation of bakers the craft of reheating a frozen pastry by pressing a button and setting a timer.
"This is not a shop. This is a cathedral," said Dermot Halliwell-Bunce, the chain's Regional Director, speaking from a portable oven erected on the village green for the announcement. "We looked at Milton Keynes. We looked at a retail park outside Swindon with excellent access. And then we came to this village and we thought, yes. These people are ready. These people have been ready for forty years and nobody has had the courage to tell them."
The pub is one of two remaining in the village, a figure the parish council has previously described as "inadequate" and the chain's planning statement describes as "a surplus of seating".
The chain's offer, by contrast, was submitted in cash, in a branded paper bag, by a man who then asked if anyone wanted a bake.
Independent scrutiny of the scheme has been provided by the Chiltern Institute for Nutritional Throughput, a two-person body operating out of a converted horsebox near Long Crendon, whose director previously held a season ticket to a food hygiene conference. The Institute's report finds that the proposed store would raise the ambient temperature of the village centre by 1.4 degrees, reduce the mean walking pace on the High street by nineteen per cent, and deliver an estimated 340 jobs, a figure which fell to eleven when this paper asked whether that was per year, per week, or in total, and then to "a number we are standing by" when asked which.
The Institute also confirmed that the new store would be visible from space, before clarifying that it would be visible from space only if you were already looking at Haddenham and knew roughly where the pub was.
The parish council has said it will consider the application at its next meeting, subject to finding a room large enough, the usual venue having been provisionally booked by the chain for what its letter calls "a community listening exercise and light tasting". Asked whether the village's existing bakery had been consulted, the chain's spokesman said the bakery had been "notified", which he confirmed meant a card had been posted through the door with a picture of the new building on it.
Pressed on whether a village of this size genuinely needed a bakery with a drive-through lane and its own roundabout, Halliwell-Bunce grew reflective. "Need," he said, "is a very small word for what we are doing here. Did the village need a duck pond? Did it need a green? Somebody, at some point, simply decided, and now you all stand round it taking photographs." He then asked whether the Herald wanted to see the plans for the second floor, where there is to be a window from which trainees can look down on the entire hot counter "and feel something".
The Herald has submitted one further question to the chain, which we are honouring by printing in full and without answer: if the flagship is the largest of its kind in the company, and the company has 2,400 branches, what exactly went wrong at the other 2,399?
A decision is expected in the spring. The LEASE FOR SALE sign remains in place, now flanked by a second, slightly larger sign, which is warm.