A brewery taking over a popular city centre venue has reassured customers it is ‘not in the habit of ruining pubs’ after concerns were raised that its planned refurb would damage its heritage.

Black Country Ales, which has taken over the Saracen’s Head in The Tything, Worcester, put forward plans which would see a number of changes to the grade II listed building.

This has led to several objections including one from Worcester Civic Society which said the brewery had not “recognised or considered” the listed building or its surrounding heritage and had made no attempt to minimise the impact of the refurb on the building’s appearance.

But brewery bosses said they would be protecting the building as much as possible.

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Worcester City Council’s conservation officer Paul Collins was also concerned and said he “couldn’t get his head around” the application and the planned refurbishment had been “poorly presented.”

Mr Collins said the heritage statement in the application was “rich in description [but] poor in detail.”

“The implied loss of the long-established bluebrick paving is also to be regretted and resisted,” he said, and raised an objection over the “lack of clarity.”

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While the application remains ‘live’ with the city council’s planners, a new application is being prepared that ‘preserves as much of the building as possible’ according to the brewery.

Black Country Ales managing director Graham Manwaring said: “We are a traditional pub company and we are not in the habit of developing pubs and ruining pubs. We are in the habit of restoring pubs to their former glory and enabling them to carry on trading for a long time to come.

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He said the previous application was “over costly and over complicated.”

“The new application is much simpler and retains pretty much all of the features the pub has.”

“We operate proper traditional real ale pubs and to do that you need to keep them pretty old-fashioned and retain as many of the original features as you can.

“We will retain as many original features as we can because we always do. It’s not our intention to destroy a pub, it’s our intention to look at what is there and improve it where we can.”

Mr Manwaring said the brewery was in the process of withdrawing the application put forward to the city council in September and submitting a new one.