Owners of the SP bar in Andover, Ricky & Steph Pledge, are expanding their very popular business within Andover Town Centre.
On 12th August, they will officially open the Riverside Café next door to the Historic Town Mills public house situated within the beautiful scenery of the newly added Riverside Park. This café will be open during the day, serving a range of quality snacks, including a choice of seven quality locally produced sandwiches daily.
The Pledges are also taking the lease on the lower Guildhall in the High Street to open in the Autumn. Ricky and Steph have some fantastic creative skills and have projected these to their plans to develop this iconic building into a daytime café serving brunch amongst other ideas (to be revealed) and an evening venue with inside and outside seating serving drinks and street food. Steph from SP Bar shared ‘We love Andover and have invested considerably in the town as we feel there is so much potential locally. Unlike surrounding towns, we are convenient and easy to get to, and our customers have told us they want diversity and choice, something we can offer. Where possible, we are also using local suppliers to provide everything’
Steve Godwin, the Andover BID manager, says, “We have known Ricky and Steph since they first came to the town and opened the SP Bar. They are entrepreneurial in their approach and opening the SP Bar was something new to the town that local people have so well supported, encouraging them to invest, expand, and develop. The Pledges have worked closely with the BID, who have helped to support and market their business in many different ways, including marketing through our In Andover website and social media channels.
We are delighted that Test Valley Borough Council have chosen to support a local and vibrant independent company by offering them the leases as they invest in the town and bring something new and quirky. We understand they have many things planned for the Riverside CAFE and the Lower Guildhall, and we are carrying out a promotional exercise with them next week.
We are recording a series of videos that will go out on our In Andover digital platform and through our social media channels promoting the new CAFE, which opens on Friday. The new lower Guildhall venue will offer something unique to Andover and is planned to offer a daytime array of food and drink, including brunch, light bites, and a lunch menu, before the venue transforms into a cocktail bar in the evening with a varied menu of drinks accompanied by new and exciting dishes from a variety of guest chefs and independent food traders. They will soon begin some refurbishment work, ready for their planned opening in the autumn.
We wish them a very successful future and look forward to working closely with them and supporting them in their new and exciting venues. Meanwhile, the existing SP bar continues to flourish and to be a great success, offering a fantastic array of cocktails and food with even more to come in September. It is wonderful to see our day, evening and night-time economy benefiting from local initiatives aimed at helping Andover to stay competitive and ahead of other local towns and cities”.
