“I feel like I’m the scapegoat,” says Sally Cox.
She ran The Angel pub in Roehampton for nearly 12 years, lived above it, and came to see her customers as family. Then on 10 October last year, 30 police officers in tactical gear burst through the pub’s front door and raided the place, including the flats above.
The police came equipped with a helicopter and dogs. They were looking for drugs, having recently arrested two local dealers, one of whom was known as a regular at The Angel. They clearly hoped to uncover a haul of illegal drugs and, according to Cox, several officers told her customers she was a major drug dealer and ran operations in the area.
“I’m sixty-four years old,” she told Putney.news. “I could just about walk, let alone run anything.”
The police left empty-handed, later claiming in a message to the community that they had found “a quantity of drugs” which turned out to be cannabis stalks discovered in a bedroom upstairs.
Two arrests were made: a tenant upstairs on unrelated driving charges and a second who was sat outside a different pub, the King’s Head, a short walk down Roehampton High Street from The Angel and nothing to do with her pub, Cox says.
Despite having turned up nothing, within a few months the police applied to have the pub’s licence revoked, citing “serious concerns regarding the management and operation of the premises” including fights, intimidation, crime, drug dealing and officers being assaulted.
Cox is open about the fact that The Angel and the area around it has problems. Over the course of her career, she has specialised in turning troubled pubs round. The Angel was “absolutely awful” when she took it over, she told us. Customers were openly doing drugs on the tables. It took two years to get The Angel running properly. Five people came to the Christmas dinner she started in her first year there. By the time she left, more than 30 sat down.
“It’s not the best pub in the world, which no pub is,” she says. But, she adds, “the community was brilliant, we was pretty more like a family, you know, it was pretty close.”
“They never done a walkthrough”
All Cox ever asked of the police was the occasional walkthrough. Stop in on patrol, make themselves known, leave. She put the request to the constable who is now the formal applicant on the licence revocation case before the council.
“That’s all I ever asked,” she notes. “They never done a walkthrough.”
After a wake at the pub in May 2025 ended in a fight outside – between people that don’t live locally, she notes – the relationship deteriorated. When someone broke into the pub late at night in January this year – several months after the raid – and she fended them off, Cox says the police were less interested in the attack than in obtaining CCTV footage of the pub from the same date for use in the licensing case. “What has that got to do with this?” she told them.
She tried repeatedly to arrange a meeting with PC Loizou to find out what she had done wrong. Loizou stopped returning her calls. “I feel I’m being victimised,” Cox says.
The raid
Cox was behind the bar when she saw the top of a police van with lights flashing through the window. Seconds later the officers came through the door. There was a baby shower in the garden. Police ran out there too.
She maintains she cooperated throughout, gave the police her keys and asked only that they wait while she moved her dogs. They didn’t wait. Everyone in the building was searched. Every part of the pub and the upstairs was searched. The CCTV footage shows no less than 29 police – some armed with battering rams – charging up the stairs into the pub’s private area.
After the raid, and then the break-in, Cox decided she had had enough. She was told the council wanted a new manager at The Angel as a condition of it staying open. If she left, the pub would survive; it is one of only two pubs in the whole of Roehampton, serving 18,000 residents. She left in February and moved to Essex.
The moment she left, the owners of the pub, Punch Partnerships filed paperwork replacing her as designated premises supervisor (DSP). The pub stayed open. Cox lost her home.
“My friends were there, my family,” she says. “I had to up and move.”
“What are they trying to hide?”
The first licensing hearing called by the council to discuss removing the pub’s licence was on 16 April. Cox asked to attend. She was refused. The meeting was never broadcast and two weeks later, no video or minutes have been made available; the council later told Putney.news it was adjourned at the request of the Metropolitan Police.
Cox found out about the reconvened hearing the same way everyone else did: people messaging her asking if she had seen the news. She asked again to attend. She was refused again. The hearing reconvened yesterday night, Wednesday 29 April. It was, again, closed to the public.
“What are they trying to hide?” she says. “If I’ve done wrong, I’ll hold my hands up to it. But they’re not letting me stand up for myself.”
The sub-committee will hear the police’s case. And it will hear from Roehampton’s local councillors – who have not spoken to Cox despite her having been the pub’s landlady for 12 years. A petition set up by Roehampton residents to save The Angel passed more than 675 signatures over the weekend. It is not mentioned in the meeting papers.
Cox tells us she left because she was told it would save the pub. She is not sure it was the right call. “I really should have stuck it out,” she says.
The Metropolitan Police has not responded to questions put to it about Cox’s version of events. Roehampton’s three local councillors have also not responded to questions about their understanding of events and who they have spoken to about it. Punch Partnerships has not responded to multiple questions on this story.
