You Don’t Get to Build a Legacy Without Bleeding for It

Mothers’ Ruin

Seventeen years ago, I opened a bar in what felt like a graveyard. Nine dead units on the street. One pub on life support. No promises, no blueprint — just a working-class bloke with a decent instinct for a pint and a high tolerance for risk.

That bar was Mother’s Ruin. The street? St Nicholas. The gamble? Everything I owned and everything I didn’t.

Back then, we charged entry to a pub. Not a club. A pub. Two quid on the door like we were Studio 54, except our VIPs were art students from Bower Ashton with paint on their jeans and half a tenner between them. And you know what? It worked. Because it wasn’t about drinks, it was about belonging. The kind you can’t buy, brand, or retrofit.

Becks Vier poured like tap water. Castlemaine was two quid. Craft beer was still just a glimmer in a hipster’s beard. And Bristol? She was still wearing her bruises with pride — not the polished PR-machine city we know now.

The street outside? Nine empty units. Opening anything here was career suicide. But we weren’t thinking about careers. We were thinking about music, misfits, and making something that didn’t suck.

Fast forward: The Ruin survived. Then came The Crown. Then Colosseum. And I didn’t just grow venues — I grew humans.

I’ve got four kids. Oldest is 26, youngest is 4. That’s not a family, that’s a timeline of poor impulse control and heart. Two of them work with me in the business now — not because I forced them, but because they’ve got it. The instinct. The edge. The same haunted look in the eye when a pipe bursts on a Saturday night and everyone’s pretending not to smell it.

They weren’t handed anything. They’ve earned it — pint by pint, shift by shift. They've seen the business from behind the taps and under the tables. The tantrums. The triumphs. The body bags of burnt-out bartenders we’ve dragged into the morning. They've lived it.

And maybe, if the world doesn’t fully collapse by then, the younger two will join someday. I hope so. But if they take one look at this circus shitshow and run screaming in the other direction? I won’t blame them.

Somewhere along the way — about 15 years back — I picked up a business partner. Didn’t plan on it, didn’t put out an ad. Just found someone who was in the fire with me and never blinked. I trust him like a brother. We've fought, we've fixed, we’ve kept this mad engine running with spit, hope, and too many late-night texts that start with "Have you seen the CCTV?"

And through it all — every flooded cellar, every unpaid invoice, every toilet blocked five minutes into service — I’ve had a wife by my side who’s lived and breathed the damp off the walls with me. She’s seen the full ugly miracle of this business. She’s held the line when I couldn’t. This isn’t just my story — it’s hers too.

This isn’t legacy. This is a family business that bleeds like a barback on his first shift. This is long hours, short fuses, and Christmases where you’re too tired to open gifts because someone called in sick and the keg fridge exploded.

But we’re still here. Still standing. Still pouring.

I didn’t build an empire. I built a refuge. For misfits, weirdos, working-class kids, and now — apparently — my own blood.

Cheers to that.