Local wellington residents queued outside Joule’s Brewery’s latest project awaiting the opening of its flagship pub for Telford. The Cock Hotel Wellington, following a refurbishment that took over two years, investing over £1m in the project is the largest pub refurbishment that the Shropshire brewery has undertaken.

The Brewery wanted to be in Wellington, MD Steve Nuttall explains why.

We really like the town, Wellington is a historic center and we love old pubs with interesting stories and deep roots in the community. For us Wellington has a real sense of place, it’s quite traditional with its own identity it felt like the right place for our Telford flagship. Of all the pubs we most wanted was the Cock Hotel, it was a part of the old Joule’s estate which pulled on our heartstrings, and of course, is an iconic alehouse.

The Brewery researched the history of the pub with Richard Bromlow who revealed the origins of the pub as a coaching inn on the old Roman road, a very important staging post during the 18th and 19th centuries. Joule’s have refurbished the original stables and created an inner courtyard around what would have been a busy and frenetic space for carriage team changeovers.

Our approach was to restore the sense of grandeur and status of the coaching inn era, Richard explained to us what a good example this is and how important that era was, the pub has that amazing buzz and historic feeling of a really old inn, it has charisma and atmosphere, that’s why we have invested so substantially, works which are once in a generation and will set up the Cock Hotel for the long term.

The project ran into the pandemic, which made life tricky, but we are very proud, albeit very late, to let locals see our work and for us to be a part of Wellington, to have the Cock back in Joule’s livery is a landmark for us and despite the difficulties of the last couple of years, we could not be happier with the overall result.

The Cock Hotel has been substantially extended with a new state of the art kitchen facility, the new room which features a six-meter bi-fold door crafted by local oak specialist Venables opens the whole area onto the courtyard, a bespoke steel ceiling was made by Minshall’s of Market Drayton along with steel windows hand made by Ferro of Market Drayton. The original bars have all been restored by master craftsman Eddie Chapman Smith. Forman Chris Blase ‘It has been a huge overall team effort, along with all the Joules projects, we work as a team, the trades all input into the design, so we deliver the detail that characterises Joule’s pubs, we are all really chuffed with this one.

Joule’s intends to submit the project to the national pub design awards in 2023.