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How the Samuel Smith beer baron built Britain's strangest pub chain

Since the 1970s, Humphrey Smith has acquired scores of pubs and historic properties around the UK. But time after time, he has left the buildings empty. Why has he allowed his empire to moulder?

Until earlier this year, the Samuel Smith website quoted admiringly from The Moon Under Water, George Orwell’s 1946essay about his ideal pub: a quiet place, free of “drunks or rowdies”, frequented only by regulars who sit in the same chair. After Margaret Thatcher’s government established the London Docklands as an “enterprise zone” which offered tax breaks to businesses setting up there, the family seized the opportunity to acquire, via one of their companies, two blocks of flats in Wapping opposite the Captain Kidd. Tucked among the oral histories of previous landlords, I found an old photo of a young man called Miles Pennett wearing a fancy waistcoat, surrounded by bandmates and playing an accordion at a very boozy-looking party.

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