Peterborough's Paul Pry pub to close today

The pub, a fixture on Lincoln Road at Walton since the 1930s, is serving its last customers before becoming a restaurant solely for the neighbouring Premier Inn, which was built on the pub’s play area in 2007, from tomorrow.

It is part of a drive by owners Whitbread to add hotel rooms to its Premier Inn sites and lose some of its branded restaurants – Paul Pry is part of the Table Table brand.

A spokesperson for Whitbread said: “After many years serving the community we can confirm that the Paul Pry is closing its doors (last day of operation is July 04).

"We'd like to take this opportunity to thank the local community for their support over the years and our amazing team members. The nearest Whitbread restaurant is now the Granary Beefeater and we do hope to welcome people there.”

The news follows Whitbread’s outstanding full year results in April when it outlined its future strategy and launched its “Accelerating Growth Plan” that will add 3,500 new hotel rooms to Premier Inn’s UK pipeline and evolve its food and beverage offer, to meet increased demand and deliver a better experience for even more hotel guests.

It said then: Our Accelerating Growth Plan will deliver a better guest experience and enhance returns by replacing lower-returning restaurants with higher-returning hotel rooms in high demand locations

“Over the next 24 months we plan to replace around 112 of our lower-returning branded restaurants with integrated restaurants and use the vacated space to add new higher returning hotel rooms to help meet strong demand. In FY24, these branded restaurants generated an adjusted loss before tax of £19m.

“At these locations we will transfer the delivery of F&B for our hotel guests to an integrated restaurant that will be built inside the neighbouring hotel, mirroring the successful format of our 387 integrated restaurants that are already in operation across our estate.”