Loungers celebrates 200th Lounge opening

Published by

Peter Davison

Loungers

Loungers, the hospitality firm that started life 21 years ago with a single café in Bedminster, Bristol has just opened its 200th Lounge.

Verdetto Lounge opened yesterday (Wednesday) in Buckingham.

The opening means an investment of around £1 million into the town, along with the creation of around 30 jobs.

Alex Reilley, Chairman and co-founder of Loungers, said: “We are hugely proud of the positive impact that our sites have had on local communities right across the UK since opening the first Lounge 21 years ago.

"We are determined to continue playing a major role in breathing new life into high streets, as well as creating and sustaining much-needed local employment.

"Time and time again we’ve seen that the opening of a Lounge has a really positive knock-on effect on the businesses around it and, of course, on the local employment market.

"Last year alone we created around 1,000 new jobs through new site openings and are on course to comfortably exceed that figure in the current year.

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"To be opening our 200th Lounge is a fantastic landmark, but there is lots more for us to go for. We firmly believe that there is scope to have at least three times that number of Lounges in the longer term, and we are more ambitious than ever before about our plans for the future.”

Loungers recently said there was scope for at least 600 Lounges across the UK, as well as additional Cosy Clubs and Brightside roadside cafes, of which there are 35 and three respectively.

Today’s 200th Lounge opening brings the total estate size up to 238.

Peter Davison

Peter Davison is deputy editor of The Business Magazine. He has spent his life in journalism – doing work experience in newsrooms in and around Bristol while still at school, and landing his first job on a local newspaper aged 19. By 28 he was the youngest newspaper editor in the country. An early advocate of online news, he spent the first years of the 2000s telling his bosses that the internet posed both the biggest opportunity and greatest threat to the newspaper industry and the art of journalism. He was right on both counts. Since 2006 he has enjoyed a career as a freelance journalist. He lives in rural Wiltshire with one wife, two children, and three cats.