Greenwich Auction house set to become Paul Rhodes bakery
Plans are in to turn the former Greenwich auction house on Old Woolwich Road into a bakery.
The bakery would be operated by Paul Rhodes, with the application stating:
“Originally set up in Surrey Quays the company moved to Greenwich in 2004 to the Lassell Street premises which still forms the heart of the business today but due to the success of the business was expanded to take on the adjacent property known as Hoskyns Street in 2014”.
A previous application was reduced given a lack of detail on parking, waste and whether it “would be an efficient and compatible use of the land within its surrounding context”.
The company sate they are seeing strong growth of 25 per cent requiring expansion.
Moving away
They state without approval they would leave:
“PRB sees that the expansion into the Old Auction House is critical to the success of the business and its ability to remain in the Greenwich area as the business wants to retain the benefits of being an effective single site but it is clear there is a need for room to expand and grow because of the demand for its products which is set to continue to grow.
Without this opportunity it is clear that the business would need to relocate in the near future which is something that it doesn’t want to do at all.”
The company seek to increase employees from 165 to 210 by 2024.
The auction house closed in March 2020. The building is owned by Morden College.
Click here to view plans.
Let’s hope Paul Rhodes bakery can expand in to the old auction house site in Greenwich and create more jobs for local people.
I don’t understand the proposal. Is Paul Rhodes going to consolidate the other sites into a single space OR is Old Woolwich Road to be ‘baking central’. I don’t see customers making a beeline for that slightly off the beaten track site to get their fix of the sweet stuff.
Considering how mutable establishments such as pubs have become maybe it’s actually a restaurant of some kind posing as a ‘bakery’’.
For example: any given Young’s pub in Greenwich (Enderby house, Richard I …) has very little to do with being ‘a pub’ and a great deal to do with dubious lifestyle/ tourist deadfall trap gastronomy at overinflated prices.
Paul Rhodes Bakery is just overpriced nonsense in any case. The whole point of a bakery is freshly baked bread daily; in that place it’s left in the window for centuries until it becomes fossilised.
The whole point of a bakery is to make whatever the baker thinks their customer wants.
Oh! How wonderful! A visitor from Harvard Business School!
This is an industrial bakery.
Customers aren’t going to come directly to the factory, they’ll get the baked goods via a shop.
Therefore this is really about extending the existing site to increase production and create more jobs.
That makes a nonsense of your advertising copy, though:
Quote: “Handcrafted breads, pastries and cakes sold straight-from-the-oven”
Your products aren’t “straight-from-the-oven”; they’re from a factory, then sit in a shop for days on end going stale and hard.
No they don’t, They bake fresh daily and transport them down the road to the shop (probably less than half a mile). They are straight from the oven. Why so derogatory?
I think the Paul Rhodes bakery factory supplies products to a few of the coffee places along Trafalgar Road as well. I’ve had the exact same slice of layered carrot cake with buttercream, nuts and raisins in three different places, including the official Paul Rhodes shop in town centre.
It is nice though, so I’m not complaining.
@Ballard, even a fresh bake will go hard on the display stand. I once paid quite a lot of money for a slice of lemon chiffon cake and was disppointed to find the icing was brittle. I am pretty sure that it wasn’t a week old. However, good luck to Paul Rhodes. I am not their customer.
@anonymous201481 Yes, I’m sure you have a point there. Many reviews of this place detail what I refer to, though.
I lived in France for a few years and visited boulangeries daily, along with the same in other countries in Europe; not once did I encounter such poverty of spirit at such exorbitant prices as one finds their London equivalent.
The English always screw this kind of thing up as miserable exploitative greed is their strongest drive.