Loungers opens its 200th Lounge

In Buckingham, Verdetto Lounge is intended to offer a 'home-from-home for its customers, offering excellent all-day food and drink, with a real focus on making a positive impact on the local community'.

Launched 21 years ago, the café, bar and restaurant brand has enjoyed success with sites in often not obvious areas including so-called secondary town and city locations. 

The group - which also operates Cosy Club and more recently launched roadside diner brand Brightside​​ - says each of its Lounge sites contributes an average of nearly £1m investment to the local high street it serves, and the creation of up to 30 new jobs.

Despite well-documented stories predicting the demise of the high street, well-researched geographical positioning has meant Lounges have prospered up and down the country, often helping to create a destination location and reinvigorating the adjacent retail landscape in the process, the group says.

Lounges are now located within the principal shopping areas of towns as far south as St Ives, Cornwall and north as Morpeth in Northumberland. 

“We are hugely proud of the positive impact that our sites have had on local communities right across the UK since opening the first Lounge 21 years ago,” says co-founder and chairman Alex Reilley. 

“We are determined to continue playing a major role in breathing new life into high streets, as well as creating and sustaining much needed local employment. Time and time again we’ve seen that the opening of a Lounge has a really positive knock-on effect on the businesses around it and, of course, on the local employment market.”

 “To be opening our 200th Lounge is a fantastic landmark, but there is lots more for us to go for. We firmly believe that there is scope to have at least three times that number of Lounges in the longer term, and we are more ambitious than ever before about our plans for the future.”

Loungers recently said there is scope for at least 600 Lounges across the UK, and also announced that it intends to open 34 new sites across its three brands in the current financial year.

Today’s 200th Lounge opening brings the total estate size up to 238, including 35 Cosy Clubs and 3 Brightsides.