Local bakery name Pinkmans has been going from strength to strength since a devastating fire meant the permanent closure of their Park Street bakery and cafe back in June 2023. On the morning of Friday, June 28, at around 4am, Pinkmans head baker Pete “walked in for his first day back after a rather fabulous time at Glastonbury Festival“, the Pinkmans team describe, “ready to get stuck into a day of producing delicious treats for the regulars of our beautiful Park Street bakery.
“Instead he was met by a glow of orange and a cloud of smoke on the staircase leading to his production space. Within moments of sounding the alarm, eight fire engines and several crews were on site to start the process of putting out the now raging flames rising from our beloved home.
“Thousands of gallons of water later, and after hours of incredibly hard work from the teams of Avon Fire and Rescue Service, the flames were out, both literally and emotionally for our passionate team at Pinkmans.”
Pinkmans director Ross Gibbens, took over the ownership of the brand in September 2023 and describes how the team believed that it could potentially be the end of the Pinkmans name, upon discovering that they wouldn’t be receiving anything from their insurance provider. Speaking to BristolLive, he said: “It’s definitely been one hell of a 16 months or so. It’s definitely not been boring.
“At the moment in the business we’re positive. We’ve gone through a lot since the fire and the business has changed a lot. The way we operate is completely different – we like to think we’re more efficient now, more stable. But we are also quite open about how the business is going, particularly in terms of the senior team.”
Pinkmans boasts three branches – the recently opened Bristol Cathedral cafe, a cafe on Whiteladies Road, and the Westbury-on-Trym site they share with Goldfinch Create and Play– and the brand has taken on a number of collaborations and partnerships with other local bakery brands, in order to keep the name alive and the team in work. Its pop-up site on Bristol’s Gloucester Road recently closed its doors to coincide with the opening of the Bristol Cathedral venture, and to make way for a new opportunity to open a brand new permanent cafe in Stokes Croft.
Ross and his team have launched a Crowdfunder with the hopes of raising £20,000 – in it they say that the help they have so far received from fellow local independent businesses, is what has kept the Pinkmans name alive. “We found ourselves in the position of being without a bakery, no equipment to produce with, no restaurant to trade from and a team of loyal, hardworking staff who were wondering what the future held for Pinkmans and themselves.
“We thought that the Pinkmans journey had come to an end after eight years of joy, but then our phones started to ring. News had started to spread around the city of the situation, and what followed will forever be ingrained into the DNA of Pinkmans. In a show of what can be achieved when you are surrounded by a community of hardworking and loving people, who stand up and come to your aid in times of need, the offers of support and help came in their droves.
“From offers of pop ups, supply, work for staff, and all round support, we were made to feel that Bristol love first-hand and the first shoots of hope began to flourish. But it was an offer from the incredible Anna, of Anna Cake Couture, to share a section of their production space that catapulted our ability to start producing again and trading.
“We’ve built up the business with the amazing prep unit we’re in with Anna Cake Couture. Anna reached out to me after the fire and offered us a space in their new lovely big prep unit down in Barton Manor, and basically that’s changed the way the business works.”
While the work itself is more efficient with the ability to produce everything in one place and send it out fresh to the small cafe teams across the city, Ross adds that it does “add another overhead”. “This kind of production kitchen doesn’t come for free – there’s a lot of cost that goes into it,” he says.
When it comes to their potential new opening, Ross says: “There’s a lot happening in Stokes Croft. It’s such a buzzing area, and that fits with us. It’s almost like the soul of Bristol.
“We feel like over the nine years of Pinkmans being around, that we’re a part of Bristol, so it’s somewhere we should be, and so we’ve found a really nice site. Because of the way the business is at the moment, our cash situation is always super tight. Our payroll is something we really have to focus on in the weeks leading up to it.
“There’s no surplus of cash, so to speak. So we’re using the Crowdfunder to ask our regulars, our fans, followers and our customers, for help. There’s a monetary value to everything – eg if you buy a £20 balance, you get £20 at Pinkmans. So we’re not asking for any freebies. It’s just a way of helping us fund getting it open.
“We’re confident it’s going to trade well, it’s going to contribute to the business, it’s going to help us employ more people and grow and expand our community in Bristol.
“Obviously when we had Park Street it was great and it was a treat for people if they were in town. They’d come to Pinkmans and treat themselves. But we feel that this way we can get out more to our customers and be more like a neighbourhood thing, as well as a destination. It will hopefully add to our little family of cafes.”
Bristol Cathedral had been without a cafe for some two years, with its previous cafe not very accessible for customers. Again, the team at the Cathedral reached out to Pinkmans and asked if they would be interested in taking on the space and trading in it. Ross says: “We’ve already been really busy, and we’ve only been open about a week.
“It put us back on Park Street in some ways, which was nice, and on the first day we were seeing a number of old regulars from our original site, which was really lovely to be honest.”
The Pinkmans site on Whiteladies Road opened last September following the fire, and Ross says: “We were trying to keep as many staff as possible employed and that’s when I took over the business. We found that site very quickly and that again is ever-evolving – we’re putting in a new floor and making improvements over the next couple of months which should have been done before we opened, ideally, but we just didn’t have the money and the priority was just on trying to save jobs and save the business.
“Again there’s a real community down there and it’s been amazing to become part of that. They ‘ve been really supportive.”
Add to that the Westbury-on-Trym branch, which Ross says was somewhat of a joint venture with Nicole from Goldfinch Create and Play – a space for families with an ethical outlook, and a cafe on the ground floor that now houses Pinkmans goods. All in all, Pinkmans has well and truly risen from the ashes, and is continuing to rise across many a neighbourhood in Bristol.
Ross goes on to say: “We are part of Bristol. It was really hard when we were closing Park Street, and even on the Monday closing the Gloucester Road pop-up, there were at least a dozen people coming up and saying ‘oh no’ – and you saw what that space had meant to them. It’s all about that connection with the community.
“Our staff will be doing their shopping at the supermarket on a Wednesday afternoon and they’ll have regulars from the cafe coming up to them and saying hello. I like to think that we’re a nice little kind of oasis from everything going on in people’s lives at the moment. We’re connected with the people of Bristol. There’s a mutual relationship there.
“And every new community we’re a part of, we’re the ‘hello’, we’re the wave out of the window when they haven’t got time to stop. And to think, once upon a time, we thought we’d be gone forever.”