ONE of the new owners of a popular city centre pub has said they “are excited” to take on running the business.

As previously reported, Deacons, on Fisherton Street, has changed hands, with former owners Dave and Aimee Hancock handing over ownership to Matthew Thorne (29) and Ben Goldsmith (25).

Matthew told the Journal that he and Ben are excited to take on the pub, saying: “Ben and I have been mates for years.

Ben and MatthewBen and Matthew (Image: Matthew Thorne)

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“We’ve always wanted to do something together, and I’ve been involved with Dave and Aimee in the pub and the opportunity came up for us to take it on. It’s a pub that we both know really well and we’re just excited to take it on.

“Dave and Aimee have done an amazing job in there of building an amazing platform for us to build on.

“It is a great pub, and it’s in a great location. We’re both from Salisbury, born and bred, and we love having things in the city and we don’t like seeing things close. It felt like the right time for us to take something together.”

Matthew said that he and Ben are hoping to keep Deacons as an independent, traditional pub.

He explained: “We’re not going to make any immediate change in there. We have some ideas – we’d like to put in a dark kitchen to bring some new food concepts to Salisbury, we have some exciting ideas for that – but we’re not going to make any changes immediately.

“We still want to keep the foundation as a really nice, traditional English boozer.

“The location where it is, right next to the train station, to have a traditional pub on the walk into town for the tourists is a really big part of the business. So that isn’t something we want to take away.

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“But we will make some changes within there, but still keeping the character, still serving local beers. We really want to support local independent brewerys, so to have those sorts of things on rotation, as well as having some good, well-known beers that everyone loves and enjoys.”

Ben and Matthew took over Deacons at the end of July. Matthew continued: “It is still early days. The announcement went out earlier this week, but I think the response has been really positive so far.

“All of the locals seem to be interested and intrigued in what we’re doing and where the pub is going to go.

“We’re looking forward to getting stuck into it.”