Meet the men trying to revive our pubs — and farms — for the price of one

A bull, a pelican and a badger walk into a bar. It sounds like the start to a bad joke rather than the premise of a multi-million-pound business. Yet for Phil Winser, James Gummer and Olivier van Themsche, the men behind one of Britain’s fastest-growing hospitality brands, those three totemic creatures are synonymous with a new kind of pub that looks to reinvigorate British traditions via good food, good looks and good times.

Public House Group (PHG) is a consortium of ventures that includes five pubs and a restaurant. Since taking over Notting Hill’s The Pelican in 2022 — a former backstreet boozer on All Saints Road — the group has cemented its imprint on London’s plummiest neighbourhoods. In tow came The Hero, in Maida Vale; The Fat Badger, in Ladbroke Grove; and The Hart, in Marylebone. Downstairs from The Fat Badger is the brand’s critically acclaimed restaurant, Canteen. The group’s country outfit — The Bull in Charlbury, Oxfordshire — opened to much fanfare in 2023: Giles Coren declared it ‘the best pie and pint of [his] life’. More gastropubs are coming soon: The Coach, in Clerkenwell, is due to open in spring and another, CeCe's in Holland Park, was announced only last week (taking over the site of Casa Cruz). PHG’s meteoric rise comes at an ironically perilous time for Britain’s pubs — more than 200 were forced to shut down in the first half of 2025 due to a hike in business rates. Now, a tighter cap on the drink driving allowance means rural hostelries are feeling the pinch even more.

PHG’s London pubs follow a tried-and-tested formula. They occupy not one, not two, but three or four floors in a building. This vertical elevation mirrors their metaphorical ascent, the different levels allowing them to diversify their offering within a single site. There’ll usually be one or two private dining rooms, a bar spinning vinyl records or hosting a band on certain week nights and, of course, the good old pub on the ground floor. (Menus vary from floor to floor, catering to different tastes, but consistently excellent.) Getting a table at The Fat Badger on Thursday is nigh impossible — it turns into a honky tonk from around 9.30pm — yet all PHG pubs are always consistently, enviably busy: even a Tuesday night at The Bull sees dining tables about 50% occupied (the singer-songwriter Jack Savoretti is there the night I drop by). Mr Gummer insists, however, that ‘we always hold space for walk-ins’: the idea being to keep the true locals, who don’t typically book ahead, loyal to the business.

On the face of it, the key to PHG’s success is money. (Mr Gummer attended Eton College; Mr Winser went to Marlborough.) Their pubs look, and feel, flush with cash — Mr van Themsche, who founded a successful e-commerce company in the past, looks after business affairs — as do many of their patrons living along the London-to-Chipping Norton corridor. Good aesthetics are vital to their popularity: PHG pubs are designed to emulate the feel of a country house. ‘We all share this love of stripping back and getting rid of anything that isn’t necessary,’ Mr Winser explains: think stripped wood, plastered walls and specials written out on chalkboards. The nifty à la carte menu fits on a single side of A5 paper, usually printed in Garamond. Lighting is dim and flattering: these are spots that look as good in pictures as they do in real life. All the knives are by Katto and the Windsor chairs at The Bull are the fruit of a collaboration with renowned restorer Mark Groethe.

‘Our rule,’ says Mr Gummer of picking which manufacturers to partner with, ‘was that we’d only work with people we’d want to have a pint with.’ His pubs are popular date spots and their private rooms comically oversubscribed; Jo Ellison, editor of FT How To Spend It, threw her 50th birthday party at The Hero in 2025. Yet dig beneath the surface and a more nuanced picture begins to appear (plus, I daresay, a more noble one, too). PHG’s founders are adamant that their pubs are still pubs, serving British fare and pouring real pints, even if the house cider is Showerings (a desirable label from Somerset). They are not members’ clubs, despite their aura of exclusivity and penchant for a party. ‘We are like a members’ club without the membership fee,’ says Mr van Themsche. Mr Gummer name-checks The Eagle and St John as two of PHG’s primary reference points — establishments whose distinction lies not in their clients, but in their culinary point of view. He confirms the only criteria for membership is familiarity. ‘You build your membership by living nearby,’ he says, ‘getting to know the bartenders and the people who are in here all the time.’ A rumour has been circulating about PHG acquiring a Mayfair townhouse to turn into a vrai-de-vrai members’ club, which I was told would operate over eight floors. Mr van Themsche waves this away. ‘That’s two more floors than the last time I heard someone say that!’

Elitism aside, the PHG boys have found themselves in the right place at the right time. With more pubs shuttering and coming up for sale, they have plenty of opportunity before them to expand. Yet they are not vultures — and their pubs are popular precisely because they do not feel like a shoehorn. They are, of course, exceptionally polished (a friend once likened The Bull to Marie Antoinette’s cottage at Versailles), yet their atmosphere feels unforced and welcoming. Across the road from The Bull is a pub that might be its antithesis — The Rose & Crown, an unpretentious boozer serving ales and snacks behind the counter. Mr Gummer was there the other day and talks about it reverently. ‘It’s really tough for those pubs at the minute,’ he says. Food, by contrast, has long been one of PHG’s calling cards: the group is a favourite employer of bright young chefs.

Besides good looks, PHG owes much of its success to choice locations. ‘You’ve got to understand an area before you start a business in it,’ Mr Gummer says. ‘When you do, you become a part of it.’ None of their sites has been selected randomly: The Pelican was Mr Gummer’s local when he first moved to London and worked in a restaurant down the road, The Hero was near where his wife grew up and The Fat Badger was Mr Winser’s local when he first lived in Notting Hill some 20 years ago, before moving to New York. His restaurant there, closed in 2020, was called The Fat Radish in homage. The Hart, for its part, is a stone’s throw from Chiltern Firehouse, where Mr Winser’s sister used to work.

Their most personal acquisition, however, was The Bull, where Messrs Winser and Gummer grew up and drank their first pints together. Mr van Themsche would join the triad later, after he forged a friendship with Mr Winser when the two were living in the Big Apple. Mr Winser worked there for over a decade and describes his experience as ‘burning’. Working as a team, the PHG founders play to each other’s strengths: Mr van Themsche looks after the money, Mr Gummer the food and Mr Winser the interiors, although their dominions intersect more often than meets the eye.

More importantly, their vision is collective: PHG aims to reinvigorate Britain’s agricultural heritage through pubs and thereby champion two institutions for the price of one: the farm and the boozer. Returning from New York during the pandemic, Mr Winser mused about buying a farm in Somerset, where he planned to develop ‘an agriculture and hospitality programme’. In the end, he says, it was a dream he ended up ‘reverse engineering’. ‘It was going to take a while to get the hospitality side of things off the ground, building cabins and farmhouses and the sort.’ As for the agricultural side, ‘the guy who was trying to sell me the farm didn’t sugarcoat things in the slightest: I was going to be responsible for 400 head of cattle, trout production, honey, lots of chickens…’

The scale could have overwhelmed a less seasoned restaurateur, but, upon hearing such a list, Mr Winser decided to get creative. ‘I thought to myself: if I could sell the farm’s produce directly to restaurants rather than via a middleman, we could share that margin and turn this thing instantly profitable.’ He never ended up buying the farm, but he’s now achieved what he set out to do in reverse: pubs first, farms second. ‘We’ve become accustomed to a system where you can call a supplier and request something, anything, for the next day,’ Mr Winser continues, ‘but there’s no quality control at play there’. It’s also more expensive.

So that I might admire PHG’s distribution system first hand, Mr Winser and his colleagues invite me to conduct my interview in the Cotswolds. We meet at The Bull, which has stood in the same spot since the early 1500s (the founders refer to themselves not as the building’s owners, but its ‘custodians’) and from whence J. D. Vance was allegedly turned away this summer after his team asked the pub to empty for him and his entourage. The boys take me for a spin in one of the many Defenders that line the car park at the rear of the building — which, I’m later told, was nearly turned into a house. We drive out a couple of miles to visit the allotment where the group grows most of their vegetables and the founders show me the third and most important reason for their success.

Row upon row of herbs and vegetables shine in the crisp January sun. Mr Gummer gestures to an adjacent plot of land, recently acquired, in a manner reminiscent of The Lion King. It smells earthy and abundant: precisely the ‘reverse engineering’ Mr Winser was talking about. After working with local suppliers for years (Whittington Lodge Farm, Paddock Farm, The Kitchen Garden People), the boys realised they could do this themselves. They hired farmers from Cornwall who had recently sold their land and are now pioneering a direct-to-publican model in this rarefied patch of the Cotswolds.

We make a deliberate stop at FarmED, a non-profit education centre on Honeydale Farm that extols an environmentally conscious approach to agriculture and where vegetables are grown seasonally. Mr Winser is cautious not to use any buzzwords, which he dismisses as a ‘New York restaurant habit’ he’s proud to have disinherited (‘words like local or sustainability… we’ve tried to move away from that’). Yet ‘seasonality’ applies quite clearly here. ‘Take tomatoes, which can vary incredibly in variety,’ Mr Winser says. ‘We really shouldn’t be eating them in times of the year when they haven’t been picked fresh off the vine.’

By focusing purely on quality ingredients, PHG hopes to reinvigorate the patch of the countryside its founders are so fond of — and which their parents remember as a thriving community before the railway services connecting Charlbury to London became more frequent and rural churn began. Now, as more and more city folk decamp to Charlbury to escape the Big Smoke at the weekend (The Bull, as does nearby Soho Farmhouse, benefits from this phenomenon), PHG wants to ensure the reversal of fortune does not leave out the very farming folk that made the Cotswolds rich and famous in the first place. The goal is to get gastropubs working together with farms in order to improve both their stock, relying on that week’s bounty and adapting the menu accordingly. Good news, too, for the highly experienced chefs Mr Gummer makes a point of hiring: this kind of variety makes their job more interesting, allowing them some freedom and creativity to redevelop the menu and put their stamp on it.

In bridging the gap between the land and the kitchen, PHG is expanding into outdoor events. High on the agenda for 2026 is The Bushcamp, ‘a nomadic English safari experience’ for shoots, summer parties or more intimate gatherings, according to its website (minimum spend: £6,000). PHG organised a press day for The Bushcamp last November where journalists were able to hear from the founders over roast lamb and muntjac tea — an underrated hangover cure. ‘It’s great that you’re doing this,’ I tell the boys. ‘Was the business logic behind it to give shoot food a little zhuzh?’ Mr van Themsche laughs. ‘The truth,’ says Mr Winser, ‘is that so many people come to stay in hotels around here and ignore just how beautiful the countryside around them really is. We wanted to come up with something that takes people further afield and beyond the immediate perimeter they too often stay in—in Nature, in the wilderness.’

Click here for more information on The Bushcamp and to book.

This feature originally appeared in the March 4, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.