News

Devon pub collapses after torrential rainfall

30 October 2023 By Louis Thomas

Part of The Ship Inn at Cockwood collapsed over the weekend after days of heavy rainfall weakened its walls.

Paul Hutchinson / The Ship Inn, Cockwood / CC BY-SA 2.0

The historic pub’s walls are made from cob, a building material once highly popular across the West Country consisting of mud, some organic aggregate (typically straw), and often with a lime-washed outer layer.

However, while there are certain advantage to this now unfashionable material, notably that it was usually made from local resources, the heavy rain of recent days appears to have softened the material, causing a catastrophic collapse of one of its walls.

Anna Brown, partner at the pub, told BBC News South West: “We’ve been here since 2007, this is our family pub and the wall, basically, at about half 11 this morning, the wall behind the the bar fell out, fell down in towards the garden…There were some staff in there…but nobody was behind the bar.”

However, the chef did live above the pub, and he lost part of his lounge wall. No customers were present at the time of the collapse as the pub would not have opened until midday.

Stating that the wall had been assessed and deemed safe by professionals prior to the collapse, Brown said: “We are quite shocked. This is a family place, if we thought there was any imminent danger we would not have kept the pub open.”

The pub will remain closed until repair work on the wall is carried out.

The heavy rainfall of the last week has put another pub in a perilous position, as this alarming footage from The Bull’s Head along the River Thames reveals: