‘Pay what you can restaurant faces eviction from old millit transformed

A Gloucestershire restaurant with a radical business model, in that it feeds all comers regardless of their ability to pay, is losing its premises after the owner sold the property.

- Damien Gayle

The community around The Long Table, featured in the Guardian earlier this month, has been left reeling after it was ordered to move out of the mill it occupies in Stroud - even as it sought to engage with the landlord to buy the building.

The mill will be transformed from a valued community resource-it also houses a bike workshop, secondhand children's gear supplier and furniture bank into a warehouse for a local business that has bought the site.

More than 50 jobs are at risk if its businesses are forced to close.

Tom Herbert, co-founder of The Long Table, said the community had ploughed in thousands of hours of work and as much as £300,000 in cash over three years to transform Brimscombe mill from a derelict site into a bustling social centre.

"It had been derelict for 30 years, roof falling in, no services, no electricity, no water," Herbert told the Guardian.