Reopening Trailer Happiness
My life is a nice little shrine to chaos. My mind is never able to sit with a single thought quite long enough as I constantly struggle to maintain focus - I’m too easily distracted, and my attention is almost always divided, I always have 100 things to do, and I’ll attempt to do 50 of them simultaneously.
Before lockdown I was constantly traveling, collaborating, celebrating, and often failing at the most basic levels of self-care. There is never enough time in the day and like many who work in hospitality, I’m always a little tired.
This stark reality meant that when I was approached to write a piece for Discard in the midst of a COVID-19 re-opening and minor refurb of Trailer Happiness, my initial response was “yes, absolutely I will do that”.
“What is dead may never die…”
This Game of Thrones reference often pops into my head when I think about my journey into hospitality. I took over Trailer Happiness in late June of 2012 (a couple of weeks after it had officially closed forever) alongside Richard Hunt and Paul McFadyen, in what now feels like the hospitality equivalent of an arranged marriage. The doors were officially re-opened on the fourth of July (spoooky) on what we named Trailer’s Independence Day.
I didn’t really know what to expect when I bought Trailer, but it’s fair to say I entered the bar owner game at the deep end, with Trailer finding itself underwater (both literally and figuratively) more than once. I would liken Trailer Happiness being my first bar to training for a marathon by actually running a marathon. Luckily, I had much of the hospitality industry cheering me on (and handing me bottles) from the side lines. Despite the early struggles, I am forever grateful for the support and guidance provided to me by so many wonderful human beings.
It is an incredible feeling to own your favourite bar, but it’s not enough for a bar to be great only during service. For all the fun, laughter, and amazing nights, those first six months can best be described as sunny with a strong chance of shit showers. In order to convey the self-destructive nature of those early days I’ll need you to imagine Trailer as a Cookie Monster who is also made out of cookies. Trailer Happiness 2.0 unofficially died in January of 2013.
It’s a testament to this great bar that it was able to maintain altitude with a single spluttering engine long enough for me to start patching up the fuel leaks. Since then Trailer has gone on to reach new heights (see what I did there) picking up an assortment of shiny things and nice words. At no point though did I allow these successes to create a false sense of comfort - once you have worked in hospitality long enough, you’ll know that “WTF!!” never strays too far from your door.
“Hello Mr Crisis, I’ve been expecting you”.
It’s said there is nothing more certain in life than death and taxes. For a bar you can add debt and crisis.
Being an independent bar owner with bad credit (the national average is bad so it’s a good indication of how fucked we are) is difficult, but over time you begin to consider ‘crisis’ as just another unavoidable variable. You start to allocate a percentage of GP to manage imminent, unavoidable bullshit. Whether it’s a car driving into the side of your building, a power surge that blows up all the tills, fridges, and lights (on New Year’s Eve), or an accidentally placed order for 200 litres of lime juice - you are always braced for impact.
When COVID-19 showed up however, it was different. This felt like the first true crisis I’d faced as a bar owner. Human life, livelihoods, and my business all at once were in danger, and much like the puzzle of the chicken, the fox, and the corn (God I’m old), there seemed to be no obvious way to keep all three safe at the same time. Boris dithered, bar owners were encouraged to fall on their swords, and by the time the Prime Minister finally decided to officially close the hospitality sector most of us had already made that decision for ourselves.
What really came as a surprise to me was the realisation of just how fragile and financially exposed our industry is as a whole, as we either collectively placed our virtual GoFundme hats on the floor and petitioned for coin or resigned ourselves to our fates and went out of business. I found myself asking how it was that I had allowed my business to be so vulnerable, so one dimensional? I promised that if I was given the chance I would learn and re-build. Better and stronger.
The COVID-19 Pivot
The first weeks of COVID-19 lockdown brought a strange calmness. It was the first time I’d stopped moving since I’d climbed into the hospitality hamster wheel in 2012. It was the first time I’d had a chance to really sit down and take a serious look at what I was doing with the business. I sat in an empty basement bar looking up towards the front door and eventually noticed how dirty the stairs were. A decision to clean them that day lead to a three-month no-budget refurb of Trailer with the aid of a couple hundred YouTube videos and the absolute heroes who helped me pull up old carpet and cut wood in straight lines. All of a sudden, the four to six weeks it takes stuff to arrive from China wasn’t an issue, and truth be told I found I enjoyed interior design almost as much as I enjoy rum.
At the same time, I was selling merchandise from my house and making regular trips to the post office, sending packages all over the globe. As well as allowing me to pay my team during those first few months, it also allowed me to maintain a connection to the bar’s community. Indeed, it allowed me to grow it. Another strangely positive side-effect of the pandemic.
The tiny refurb was a useful distraction that allowed me to work safely away from everyone, and also made me see the bar being closed as a positive. When else would I get to do this work? Working on the bar reminded me of my complete lack of focus as I’d walk from the bathrooms to the kitchen to grab something and end up working on the back bar. This haphazard approach would almost always create more work in the long run. As much as I was learning about the mechanics of the building, I was also learning a lot about myself and the issues with my workflow.
The refresh was “completed” about ten seconds before we opened the doors on the fourth of July and the feedback has made the extended time I spent around toilet basins and ten year old carpet feel totally worthwhile. I now know every single inch of Trailer Happiness in a way I didn’t before, and for the first time in eight years I feel more of an owner than a custodian. I think it’s fair to say that every bar owner has gotten to know what their bars are made of during this lockdown. I’ve been in awe of and fully inspired by some of the genius moves made by bars across the globe since this pandemic hit; we have all had to adapt and re-invent to some degree and regardless of success or failure, we are all irrevocably changed. It’s been a long shitty road but being forced to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your business may ultimately prove to be a blessing.
The Future of Trailer Happiness
Before the lockdown I had met my landlord once back in 2012 with Paul and Richard. I didn’t speak to him much that day, but I have a vivid memory of his eyes glossing over as he listened to excited plans for the bar. It was as if he was struggling to understand peasant dialect. I’ve only dealt with his management company since, but the COVID-19 lockdown forced me to track him down and hand deliver a letter to his offices, which are also on Portobello Road (he owns a lot of Portobello). He responded that same day, and while he was not about to forgo his due rent, he has been reasonable, and conversations have opened up potential opportunities that I would never have conceived; i’ve bought back a little piece of our outside space during market days and the “Ledge Bar” we built on the top of the stairs for takeaway drinks has regularly outperformed the basement.
The bar is currently looking sexy as fuck, if I do say so myself. It may remain a staple of Notting Hill for another twenty years or it may fail in the first year post-COVID-19. We do this together. The idea of failure no longer scares me. Bring it on, I was built for this.
And to be clear, Trailer Happiness never re-opened.
Trailer Happiness died on the 18th March 2020.
On the fourth of July 2020 I opened Trailer Happiness.
What is dead may never die.