Published22 July 2026Updated22 July 2026
We're Revisiting Our Leisure Portfolio
Run a pub, bar or restaurant? A busy summer shows you exactly what your building gets right and what it doesn't. Here's what twenty years of Midlands leisure projects has taught us about fixing it.
The World Cup's over. The bunting's down, the temporary staff have drifted off, and every venue we've worked with is looking at the same question through slightly bloodshot eyes: what now? We've spent more than twenty years designing pubs, bars and restaurants across the Midlands. This is the summer we go back to them.
A Packed Room Tells You Everything
A pub in full swing is the most honest survey you'll ever get. You can see exactly where it works and exactly where it doesn't. The queue three deep at one end of the bar while the other end gathers glasses. The kitchen door that turns into a bottleneck every service. The corner nobody sits in, and the one everyone fights over.
I know what that looks like from the wrong side of the bar. I spent more than ten years working and running pubs and bars to pay my way through college and university, a decade I've since chosen to file under research.
Peak season writes all of this down for you. The World Cup filled rooms that don't usually fill, and pushed kitchens and bars to the point where the cracks show. That's not a bad thing. That's information you can't buy.
The venues we've worked with know the numbers held up. The interesting question is what the building did under the pressure, and whether it can do it again next time without the staff aging a decade.
Twenty Years of Pubs, Bars and Last Orders
We've designed across the leisure world for a long time, and it teaches you things a housing scheme never will. Licensing, cellar access, commercial kitchens, the flow of two hundred people who've all decided they need the bar at once. Every venue is a different puzzle.
Some sit in buildings that come with their own opinions. At the Canal Inn in Bullbridge, we extended a listed building with a modernist addition, laid out a garden, and reworked the interior into a microbrewery. The listed fabric didn't hold the project back. It set the terms, and the new work had to be good enough to sit next to it. That's a healthy pressure to design under.
The Canal Inn is one of four venues we've worked on for the same client, which is a story worth telling on its own.
Operators Who Kept Coming Back
When a client hands you their second pub, you've probably done the first one right. When they hand you their fourth, you can stop calling it luck. The Moorwood Hotel Collection has had us work across four of its venues: the Canal Inn, the White Hart in South Wingfield, the Horse and Jockey in Wessington, and the Hurt Arms in Ambergate.
These aren't only pubs. Several come with rooms upstairs and a wedding to host at the weekend, so the brief runs from the cellar to the bridal suite. Designing a place that pours pints on a Friday and marries people on a Saturday is a different job from either one on its own.
It's the same story with Berkeley Inns, who we worked with on the Meynell Ingram Arms. When a client runs venues for a living, you spend less time explaining and more time getting it right.
The Independents and the One-Offs
Not every project comes with a collection behind it. The Blue Bell Inn in Ashbourne stands on its own. The Range near Stretton works as a dedicated wedding venue, where the whole day has to move through the building without a single awkward pause, and the photographs have to look right in every corner.
Food changes what a room has to do. The lighting, the acoustics, the distance between the pass and the furthest table: all of it shapes whether people settle in and stay, or eat and leave. Lorentes in Derby city centre and the Book Cafe sit at that food-led end of the spectrum. A space that reads well at the door and flows well once you're inside is doing a job long before anyone looks at a menu.
That's the part people forget about hospitality design. The building is the first thing a customer experiences and the last thing they consciously notice.
The Window's Open Now
Post-event momentum is real, and it doesn't hang around. A venue that was rammed in July looks very different on a wet Wednesday in November, and the appetite to change things fades at roughly the same rate as the summer.
The operators we're talking to this summer are asking sharp questions. How do we lay out the kitchen so it doesn't fall over on the next big night? Is the bar the bottleneck, or is it the path to the bar? Can we add covers without adding square footage, because that's the real brief nine times out of ten. The old layout worked for 2004, and we're not in 2004.
None of that is trend-chasing. It's looking at what the busy weeks showed you and deciding to fix it while you still remember. If you run a venue and something's been nagging at you every service, that's not sentiment. That's the building telling you something. We're good listeners, and we've done this cycle enough times to know which questions to ask first.
Talk to us before the momentum's gone.
Areas We Cover
JSA Architects Across the Midlands
We work with venue operators, developers and homeowners across the Midlands. Fees, planning authorities, and project types vary by location: find local insight and project examples for your area:
Architects in Derby →: Quarndon, Kirk Langley, Duffield, Allestree, Darley Abbey, Mickleover, Littleover
Architects in Nottingham →: The Park Estate, West Bridgford, Edwalton, Mapperley Park, Wollaton, Bramcote
Architects in Lichfield →: Shenstone, Little Aston, Four Oaks, Streetly, Aldridge, Walsall, Tamworth, Whittington
Architects in Solihull →: Knowle, Dorridge, Hampton in Arden, Shirley, Dickens Heath, Olton
Architects in Sutton Coldfield →: Four Oaks, Wylde Green, Boldmere, Mere Green, Streetly, Little Aston
faq's
Common Questions
Both, and the refurbishments are often the more interesting job. Working out how to make an existing building do more, without losing what people already love about it, is where a lot of the craft lives.
Yes. The Canal Inn in Bullbridge is a listed building we extended with a modern addition and reworked inside. Listed status sets the terms rather than closing the door. It takes the right approach and a good relationship with the conservation officer, and we've had plenty of practice at both.
It depends on the project, and it's one of the first things worth planning around. Where the work can be phased so you keep trading, we'll design it that way. Lost revenue is part of the real cost of a refurbishment, and it belongs in the conversation from the start.
Earlier than most people think. The cheapest time to change something is on a drawing, not on site. A conversation before you've committed to anything usually saves money and awkwardness later.
We work across the Midlands from studios in Derby, Nottingham, Lichfield and Solihull, and our leisure projects run right across the region and beyond.
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