About the Haunted Hare

With every pub that closes down, so goes some of the living history which has built up in and around those buildings for often hundreds of years. The stories of pubs, their history, their collective culture, communities and their individual character are what make them what they are, and that is very hard to retrofit onto a new establishment. So we wanted to see if we could approach the problem the other way around and start a pub with the history first.

We’re artists and we love pubs. Not just for drinking in, or for what they mean to us personally, but because of what they represent to us, our culture and our collective identity. We owe a lot to David Southwell’s Hookland. Although the Haunted Hare is a project with a smaller compass, it has a very different purpose and drive. It represents things which are genuinely lost and we want to see whether, together, we can bring some of it back into existence. To rebuild a pub, albeit one which never existed in the first place.

We have no idea where this is going to go, whether it's going to take off, if anyone will contribute or even care. As is the fate of some art projects. But likewise, nor do we have a definitive vision of what the pub looked like or where it was. Even if it’s only got three things in its archive, we’d be happy for this to be a record of a pub which never was, but which could have been, and which stands in our collective imagination for all those pubs which have closed down.

For now, we’re just opening the doors.

For further reading on closing pubs visit The Lost Pubs Project.

We are also deeply indebted to Suffolk Churches.