Mad, sad and surreal times are upon us all.
A little over a month ago Matthews Yard was signing leases worth more than £1m in Croydon for its workspace premises and a new cafe, bar and community cultural space. Today we are working from home and trying to navigate the most significant public health and financial crisis many of us have ever seen, personally or professionally. Hopefully it will be the most significant we will ever see.
To keep our spirits up, we wanted to write a brief blog post to highlight things that we can all do to get through the Corona Crisis while supporting local businesses who may be struggling with the financial pressures a lockdown presents.
We wanted to keep it focused on the core values of Matthews Yard, so have broken this down into our 4 core goals of helping you eat, drink, work and relax.
Eat.
The Oval tavern, Croydon’s best pub, bar none, does a mean Sunday Roast! If only it were available every day. Since closing its doors the team at the Oval have moved much of their tasty food menu online and made it available for collection. Try it. It is amazing and their roasts are available to order and collect on Easter Sunday. What’s more, Esther is a stalwart in the community and her and her team have been delivering food all over Croydon to people at risk and in isolation and helping feed our selfless key workers at Croydon University Hospital. You can view the menu, kitchen hours and place on order on their website here https://theovaltavern.co.uk/takeaway/
We have some great local breweries in Croydon and they will be suffering financially more than most during COVID. Our two favourites Cronx https://www.thecronx.com/shop and Signal brewery https://signalbeerco.com/store/ can both deliver cans or bottles to your home, helping you drink your way through the crisis (responsibly). If you want something a little stronger, or need to stock up on other essentials like bread, pasta, vegetables. Then our friends at Freshfields market on Church Street are open every day. https://www.facebook.com/freshfieldsmarket/ 86-88 Church Street, Croydon.
Work.
But, like us, you may be struggling to find or access the help and support you need to enable your business to survive the lockdown. Local organisations have doubled down on the support and information they are providing and various teams at Croydon council have been doing an amazing job to pull information and resources together to help. We recommend you bookmark this page and visit it regularly for the latest info for local businesses from Croydon Council https://www.croydon.gov.uk/business.
We also recommend keeping in the loop with Croydon BID who are producing some fantastic content to help businesses navigate the crisis. https://croydonbid.com/. www.LinkedIn.com should also be your friend. It’s a hive of quality work related content and contacts which should help you.
If you are so inclined and want to help support us in getting through this, you can buy a gift card, become a member, or make a donation from the support us page of our website. https://matthewsyard.com/support/
