Drive north out of London for a couple of hours, head east just past the city of Leicester, bump along some of England’s finest country roads as they wind between gloriously green fields, and you eventually reach the small village of Ashby Folville, population: 174.
At the centre of it sits The Carington Arms: “Probably the prettiest pub in Leicestershire,” according to its website.
Set in lusciously green open space next to the village cricket field and presenting a charming exterior combining whitewashed stone walls with glossy black beams, from a distance, this is a village pub perfectly positioned to take full advantage of the beautiful English countryside.
But up close, a sad and disturbing reality is revealed.
On the bright February morning when The Athletic visits, the front door is locked, the lights are off and the car park is deserted. There are no deliveries of food or drink being made and no staff to be seen.
One of the window panes by the entrance is smashed.
The Carington Arms is a pretty pub (Sarah Shephard/The Athletic)
The only signs of life are an open window upstairs and a blackboard near the door that reads: OPEN THURS – SUN, ALL DAY.
Only, it isn’t. The Carington Arms hasn’t been open since Christmas, when it was operating under a temporary event notice having been forced to close its doors at the end of October last year.
Instead of being the beating heart of a community, The Carington Arms is at the centre of a bitter legal dispute. On one side, the pub’s owner, the Ashby Folville Land Trust (AFLT), led by Alex Stroud, a descendent of the Smith-Carington family who once owned the whole village, which claims it is owed thousands in unpaid rent and now has a court order allowing it to repossess the pub and recover the money.
On the other, the landlord, Lorne Sam, a former American footballer who claims he has been discriminated against because “I’m different. And the difference is that I’m American and I’m Black”.
In the middle of it all is the pub, and the community for whom it plays a central role. From the cricket team to the skittles team and the Quorn fox hunt, The Carington Arms has been a place to meet, drink and be merry for as long as the locals can remember. But the dispute between Sam and the trust has seen them drift away.
When Sam was able to reopen the pub for three weeks over Christmas, the first week was slow but brought in enough money for him to pay some of the staff. The next week was a little bit quieter. “By the third week,” he says, “we had nobody, which was interesting. I don’t think it’s the people, but the way England’s rural life is set up. You have an organisation that controls everything and they’re (local people) terrified of them because they own everything. If your family rents a farm from them, you don’t want to p*ss them off and so they’re not going to risk their family’s livelihood.”
He reads out messages from villagers he had considered friends, who, when asked if they would write him a witness statement, said they would not put themselves “in a position of exclusion from the community”.
Instead, exclusion is exactly what Sam has experienced.
Now he wonders whether there is any way back.
To understand how it all came to this, we have to go back to October 10, 2022, when once aspiring Denver Broncos and then Green Bay Packers wide receiver Sam took a flight from Atlanta, Georgia, to London Gatwick Airport.
Accompanied by his friend — and chef — Charles, the pair collected their bags and headed for the train station, bound for the market town of Melton Mowbray, in Leicestershire. From there, they took a taxi along those aforementioned country roads and arrived, tired but excited, outside The Carington Arms — the pub Sam, 39, had signed an agreement to run.
“I’d done my research on what a rural village was, so I knew there wasn’t diversity,” says Sam, who has come down from his living quarters above the pub, switched on the lights and unlocked the front door to allow us in.
“I wasn’t so much concerned with it because I understand that people are people. And it doesn’t matter if you’re white, Black, Asian, whoever; if you haven’t been exposed to a group of people, you’re going to have your pre-determined idea of what they are.
Sam at the bar of his empty pub (Sarah Shephard/The Athletic)
“In my opinion, it’s each one of our responsibilities to present something different and give a person a real interaction to start basing their opinions off.”
We sit at one of the tables by the bar, from where a quick glance around reveals a once warm and welcoming place that is desperately in need of some love. Small piles of dirt have been swept up and left dotted around the floor with the glasses hanging above the bar caked in dust. That pane of glass in one of the large windows looking out to the beautiful surrounds was broken mistakenly, says Sam, by a member of staff opening a window with too much force.
Sam’s dispute is with the trust (AFLT) which owns most of the village – including the pub — and in particular with one of the trust’s controllers, Stroud, a property consultant who lives in a large farmhouse next to the pub with his wife, Lucy, and their children.
Sam has spent the past few months preparing for a court hearing, challenging the eviction order and money judgment of around £25,000 the trust secured against him. With no funds incoming from the pub, he has been compiling and submitting the evidence himself, without any legal support.
When the hearing took place on Wednesday, April 24, Sam’s application was unsuccessful, meaning that, technically, he could now be evicted from The Carington Arms. AFLT told The Athletic it will now proceed to recover possession of the pub and consider its options in relation to enforcement of the money judgment. Sam plans to appeal.