Fifty people packed into the Park Tavern’s back room last night to hear its leaseholder vow to fight for the pub’s future.
“We are still open and we’re staying open,” Amir Matinahmadi told the crowd. “We’re gonna fight this and we’re gonna fight this to the very end.”
The meeting followed the news that Star Pubs & Bars, part of Heineken UK, has told Matinahmadi’s company to leave by 5 August. We reported yesterday on the wider dispute: a dilapidations claim that has grown to more than £200,000, a beer supply Star cut off and then restored, and Matinahmadi’s own belief that Star wants the pub empty so it can be re-let at a higher rent or sold outright. Star has not responded to nine detailed questions Putney.news put to it earlier this week.
Cllr Jasmin Glynne, the East Putney ward councillor who started the campaign’s petition, told the meeting signatures had reached 750 in seven days. Star Pubs & Bars says it has invested more than £300 million in its estate since 2018, but the company was fined £2 million by the Pubs Code Adjudicator in 2020 over its treatment of tied tenants, later reduced to £1.25 million on appeal.
The 1954 Act deadline
Matinahmadi’s account of the dispute was more complicated than a straightforward eviction. He told the room that he and Star had been in ongoing informal negotiations over a new lease throughout this period, and that it was during those talks, not instead of them, that his side missed the formal deadline to serve statutory notice under the Landlord and Tenant Act 1954.
“We made a slight mistake on our end,” he told the room, “where we maybe should have legally announced that we wanted the lease to be renewed.”
It is that missed step, while talks were still live, that Star can point to. Matinahmadi maintains the reverse is also true: that Star staying in informal negotiations with him, rather than formally responding, is itself evidence the company was never negotiating in good faith.
A history the council itself was built on
Putney MP Fleur Anderson could not be at the meeting with Glynne telling the room that she “is fully behind, 100% behind this campaign” – something worth noting since she has fought this exact battle before. Anderson was involved in the campaign to save the Wheatsheaf in Tooting, a pub whose 2013 rescue helped drive Wandsworth to bring in the Article 4 Direction that protects 120 named pubs and bars in the borough from being converted or demolished without planning permission.
The Park Tavern is one of the 120 protected sites: Wandsworth’s own schedule includes a site-specific map for 212 Merton Road. The tool exists because of a fight that looked, on paper, much like this one, and the MP now backing Matinahmadi’s campaign helped build it.
Leonie Cooper, the GLA Assembly Member for Merton and Wandsworth, urged the room to write to City Hall. “How many people think this pub is an asset that is of value to the community?” she asked. “I think we all do.” She named Howard Dawber, the Deputy Mayor for Business and Growth, and Justine Simons, the Deputy Mayor for Culture and the Creative Industries, whose team includes an asset-at-risk unit set up to help stop cases like this one.
A similar fight is playing out a few miles away. The Trafalgar in South Wimbledon, threatened with demolition, is the subject of an active community-ownership bid. The Wheatsheaf itself is still trading.
An unexpected pledge
Not every offer of help came from a councillor or an MP’s office. A sports reporter for GB News, in the audience, told the room he was sponsoring QPR’s match against AFC Wimbledon at Cherry Red Records Stadium on 1 August and was donating the entire sponsorship, including the programme cover, LED boards around the ground and a tannoy announcement, to the Save the Park Tavern campaign.
Nationally, there was a small piece of good news for pubs this week: the government has announced a 20% cut to business rates for pubs, clubs and live music venues in England, worth around £1,100 a year to a typical pub. It will not take effect until April 2027, too late to change the calculation Matinahmadi is making now.
Last orders? Not yet. Here’s how you can help
Six things you can do before 5 August, from a two-minute email to the one that matters most: turning up. Pick any. Each opens a ready-to-send email in your own app, or the right page in a new tab.
Emails open in your own app, copied to us at postbox@putney.news so we can follow the answers. Edit every word before you send. If a councillor or City Hall replies, forward it to us: that’s how the next story gets written.
Of everything said on Friday night, it was the simplest suggestion that drew the loudest response. Not the petition, not the MP’s message, not the GLA member’s list of contacts at City Hall. Come and have a pint.
