JW Lees has acquired The Stanneylands Hotel, Cheshire and The Boddington Arms, Lancashire

The Stanneylands has been bought from The Mere Boutique Ltd, with Ryan Lynn at Christie & Co brokering the deal and The Boddington Arms has been purchased from Greene King plc, with David Sutcliffe of Fleurets negotiating the sale.

William Lees-Jones, JW Lees Managing Director, said, ‘These two acquisitions follow our strategy of investing in quality pub and hotel businesses in the North West; between them they add 72 more bedrooms to our managed business, taking our bedroom numbers to 287 rooms under company management.  Both hotels have substantial food and beverage businesses which we can add value to with the JW Lees offering.  We will immediately integrate the Stanneyland’s Hotel into the JW Lees hotels business, while we have closed the Boddington Arms for a complete £1m+ refurbishment to re-open in April as ‘The Bluebird Inn at Samlesbury’, named after Donald Campbell’s world-record breaking Bluebird K7 boat whose Bristol-Siddeley Orpheus turbo-jet engine was built by British Aerospace in Samlesbury.  In additional to these acquisitions JW Lees is investing in a number of substantial refurbishments in our core estate in our last quarter including The Alderley Edge Hotel, Anglesey Arms Hotel Menai Bridge, Groes Inn Conway, Huntsman Inn Holmfirth and Trearddur Bay Hotel.  With these two new acquisitions and major developments carried out this year we will have invested over £18 million in our business in the year to March 2018.

‘JW Lees has taken this opportunity to reorganise our business to build capacity for anticipated future acquisitions:  we will now move away from the traditional model of dividing the business into Managed and Tenanted Pubs in favour splitting our business into ‘Hotels and Inns’ and ‘Pubs’ irrespective of operating model.  We remain firmly committed to all three of our three trading divisions – Hotels & Inns headed up by Tony Spencer, Pubs headed up by Chris Moulson and Sales headed up by Dean Redfern, as well as vertical integration where we can add value in key service areas like Distribution, Marketing, Property and Technical Services.  The re-brand of our beers launched in November 2017 has been well received by customers and we will be commissioning a new small-batch 10-barrel brewery, called The Greendoor Brewery, and bottling plant in the Spring.  These are exciting times at JW Lees and we look forward to continuing to grow our business.’