A Stowmarket man has reportedly remortgaged his garden shed after discovering that the Wetherspoons beer prices UK hike forces man to remortgage shed for a proper Friday pint headline was, in his case, less a joke and more a sound financial strategy.
By Our Angling Correspondent: Courtney Pike
Forty-three-year-old procurement officer and part-time darts critic, Darren Pottle, said he had initially hoped to cover the rising cost of his weekly pints by giving up branded crisps, cancelling a streaming subscription and pretending not to see the pub quiz donation bucket. But when a Friday evening round for himself and two mates reached what he described as “a figure normally associated with a modest bathroom refit”, he contacted a broker.
“I’m not made of money,” said Mr Pottle, standing outside The Pickled Magistrate with a face usually reserved for a council tax bill. “I’m made of the kind of financial resilience that allows a man two pints, a packet of Scampi Fries and then a quick look at his banking app under the table. There are limits.”
Wetherspoons beer price hike leaves shed exposed
The shed, a 6ft by 8ft timber structure containing one rusted lawnmower, three unidentified tins of paint and a box marked ‘Christmas cables’, had been valued at £14,000 by an estate agent after being described in paperwork as a “detached garden annex with storage potential”.
Mr Pottle had originally planned to use it as an office, a gym or somewhere to keep the children’s scooters until they became old enough to be sold on Facebook Marketplace for £3. Instead, it has become the foundation of a five-year fixed deal designed to protect the sacred British institution of saying, “Go on then, just the one,” at 5.14pm and returning home shortly before midnight with a kebab-related mystery.
His lender, Fenland Mutual Building Society, confirmed that it had approved the application after Mr Pottle successfully demonstrated a stable and recurring Friday-night expenditure pattern.
“Most applicants show us payslips and household outgoings,” said branch manager Colin Wraight. “Darren provided twelve months of pub receipts, a loyalty card with the corners worn off, and a handwritten note from his wife saying, ‘He will go regardless’. From a lending perspective, that is unusually persuasive.”
The society has now launched a specialist product, the Proper Pint Tracker Mortgage, aimed at householders whose outbuildings have appreciated faster than their ability to buy a round without briefly becoming philosophical.
A national crisis, measured in rounds
Although pub prices vary wildly by town, beer, day of the week and whether somebody has shouted “whose turn is it?”, Mr Pottle’s predicament has struck a chord with drinkers across East Anglia.
At 6.02pm on Friday, groups in Ipswich, Bury St Edmunds, Lowestoft and the more ambitious areas of Diss were seen studying menus with the grave concentration of people selecting legal representation. Several customers reportedly started ordering based on affordability rather than taste, leading to a temporary boom in tap water and one alarming increase in lime and soda consumption.
“It’s not that I expect everything to cost 2004 money,” said regular pub-goer Keith Mannerings, who has been having the same three pints every Friday since Blair was in Downing Street and believes this makes him an economist. “But I do think a man ought to be able to buy a lager without having to move money from the account marked ‘emergencies’. Friday is the emergency.”
Researchers at the entirely made-up East Suffolk Institute for Pub Arithmetic said the emotional impact of a price rise is rarely caused by the extra pennies alone. It is caused by the moment a drinker looks at the total, makes a tiny involuntary noise, then tells everyone at the table that prices are “getting silly now” as though they have personally just uncovered corruption at the highest level.
Professor Linda Thatch, who holds the institute’s chair in Mild Outrage, explained that the British public has a complex relationship with pub spending.
“People will pay £6.40 for a craft beer called something like ‘Bishop’s Fog Alarm’, but only if they believe they are making a choice,” she said. “What they cannot tolerate is the sense that a pint has quietly become a financial instrument. Once a man starts describing lager as an asset class, society is in trouble.”
The remortgage appointment
Mr Pottle’s broker initially assumed the enquiry was a prank, particularly when he asked whether the repayment holiday would cover bank holidays and said he wanted to fix before the August bank holiday “gets any ideas”.
But the figures stacked up. The shed had a felt roof, a padlock, and what surveyors called “excellent scope for conversion”, meaning it could conceivably accommodate a folding chair if nobody breathed too deeply. It also sat within walking distance of a bus route, which is apparently enough to make anything in Suffolk worth more than expected.
The deal released enough equity to fund 52 Friday evenings of respectable pub attendance, assuming two pints, shared chips once a month, and no friend suddenly decides it is everyone’s duty to celebrate an England qualifier with shots.
Mr Pottle insists he is not being irresponsible.
“I’ve budgeted properly,” he said. “There’s a spreadsheet. There’s a separate column for birthdays, football, reunions with people I haven’t seen since school but apparently must buy drinks for, and the period between 20 December and whenever I regain consciousness in January.”
His wife, Caroline, was less convinced. “He told me we were releasing equity for ‘household flexibility’,” she said. “I assumed boiler, roof, perhaps a family holiday. Then I found a file on his laptop called Pint Plan Final FINAL v7.”
Pub landlords urge calm, then check the gas bill
Landlords across the county have expressed sympathy while also gently reminding customers that pubs have not, in fact, invented electricity bills, business rates, staff wages, maintenance costs or the mysterious quarterly expense known only as “the cellar thing”.
One landlord, who asked not to be named because he did not want a Facebook comment section declaring him personally responsible for inflation, said the idea that a pub keeps every penny from a pint was “one of Britain’s great modern folk tales, alongside ‘the train was on time’ and ‘we’ll only have one’.”
“People see the price on the board and think we’re buying yachts,” he said. “The truth is, most landlords are one broken glasswasher away from serving ale directly from a wheelbarrow.”
That said, he agreed that any price increase can feel particularly cruel on a Friday evening, when workers arrive with the optimistic swagger of people who have survived another week of meetings and are prepared to reward themselves with something cold, fizzy and served by someone who has already heard the phrase ‘large one, please’ 400 times.
For Mr Pottle, the answer is neither abstinence nor a reckless descent into home brewing, which he attempted during lockdown and still refers to as “the incident with the radiator”. It is sensible, measured borrowing against an asset he had previously used to store a plastic patio chair with one leg missing.
His first remortgage-funded pint was purchased at 5.37pm on Friday. Witnesses said he held it up to the light, took a thoughtful sip and announced that it tasted “slightly of compound interest, but in a good way”.
He has since urged fellow drinkers not to panic, but to take a clear-eyed look at the assets around them. “Nobody wants to remortgage a shed,” he said. “But if you’ve got a garage, a loft conversion or an unusually valuable wheelie bin, at least know your options. And never buy the first round. That’s how they get you.”