Future Yard has been called the best music venue in the country. One man wants to bring it down

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I’m hardly through the door of the James Atherton pub on Victoria Road in New Brighton before I’m clapped over the shoulder, sat in a tall armchair and handed a glass mug of premium Czech pils. I’ve come to tell my gracious and garrulous host, Daniel Davies, the man credited with an almost single-handed regeneration of this part of New Brighton, that this story is perhaps not quite what he envisioned when he brought it to me back in February. I’d like to explain that he himself may feature more prominently. I also want to warn him that the man he perceives as his arch nemesis is on his way to persuade him to withdraw his on-the-record comments: 

“Craig!?” Dan says. He means Craig Pennington, co-founder of Future Yard, the grassroots music venue and the crown jewel in Birkenhead’s Town of Culture ambitions. Dan’s eyes, already saucer-like, expand to dinner plate proportions with malevolent glee, only just restraining himself from rubbing his hands together and twirling a nonexistent mustache. “Coming down here? Oh, brilliant! I can’t wait. Let him come…”

Otherwise, I can hardly get a word in edgeways. An eccentric like perhaps only this corner of this country can produce, Dan Davies is holding court. And perhaps that’s the best description of the pub where we’re now sat: the throne room for New Brighton’s nighttime scion, self-made millionaire and founder of Rockpoint Leisure. 

Back when my nan’s boyfriend ran it in the 1980s, the James Atherton was called the Railway. Since Dan’s owned it, its rechristenings have made national news: firstly during COVID lockdown as “The Three Bellends” after then-prime minister Boris Johnson, his advisor Dominic Cummings and health secretary Matt Hancock; then “The Two Helmets” once Cummings was sacked. More recently it’s been “The George Orwell” in protest at the Labour government's proposed introduction of digital ID cards for UK citizens.

“The JA’s” mercurial status is a fitting reflection of its owner, who is no longer sitting but now prowls around our table like an unblinking jaguar with a pint of Guinness. You'd never guess this was a cancer survivor in his early fifties: despite being 15 years older, Davies looks younger than me and has thrice my energy. He is telling me about his recent arrest, allegedly for damaging public bins by putting up posters criticising local councillor Tony Jones MBE. Similar posters adorn the JA’s walls, some alleging enormous public funding gaps between Birkenhead (“£100m”) and other Wirral towns like Seacombe (“£0”), Liscard (“£0”) and New Brighton (“£0”). (“That’s out of date,” someone says as I study this stark breakdown.)

The performance is darkly mesmerising. However, I can’t fully take my attention away from the object on the table in front of me. A ghostly-white, goggle-eyed apparition in papier-mâché, Dan says he made it himself. I’m later told it’s an effigy of Jones’s fellow council member for New Brighton, Sue-Powell Wilde, although Dan refers to it as “the White Walker.”