The Kings Head British Pub on U.S. 1 near St. Augustine. | Dan Scanlan, Jacksonville Today
Published on September 11, 2024 at 1:20 pm
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Back in 1990, someone driving a then-empty patch of U.S. 1 about 8 miles north of Downtown St. Augustine might have spied Ann Dyke and her then-husband Michael assembling a Tudor-style building that would ultimately be joined by a double-decker London bus.
By 1992, the cozy King’s Head British Pub was drawing pints of Old Speckled Hen and Newcastle Ale as guests indulged in bangers and mash, fish and chips and sticky toffee pudding in what really looks like a pub plucked from rural England.
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But after 32 years of serving turnovers and Cornish Pasties, hosting British car shows, and holding a coronation watch party for King Charles, Dyke says it is time to close, or “we’re going to sink” from rising costs and staffing issues.
“You can’t go on until you kill yourself. It’s just not worth it,” Dyke said last Sunday. “You need to have some kind of life, but it is going to be very sad. We cannot carry on. We worked out how much it costs us to open the doors, and some days, we are not covering that amount. We are just not getting the customers. And I don’t know why. We are still serving the same food. … There are just so many places for people to eat, and I don’t think people are eating out as often because they don’t have the money.”
And as longtime customer Mike Buresh nursed an ale nearby, he said he was “shocked and saddened” that the pub is shutting its doors.
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“We love coming here, especially on a weekend,” the Action News chief meteorologist said. “The atmosphere is incredible, and it’s like you have been transported to England, just like that. The food is delicious and the people who work here are awesome, and we will miss it.”
Dyke, herself from England, says she and her former spouse chose the spot on U.S. 1 at Venetian Boulevard so they would not be “amongst all the crowds” in St. Augustine’s tourist spots.
“Up here, we were a destination point,” Dyke says. “In England, you probably travel miles to go to a particular pub because they may do ham and eggs, or something special. We don’t think twice about getting into a car and going to special pub. So we thought we would do fine, but everybody in St. Augustine said, ‘You will never make it.’”
But they did, until COVID-19, and then things started to drop off. The pub offered takeout, and Dyke’s daughter and pastry chef Elaine Hartley-Frew got up early each day to make bread for sale.
“That’s how we kept going through COVID, just selling all different types of bread,” Dyke said.
But unlike those early days when pine trees were all you could see across and around U.S. 1 when standing in the pub’s doorway, Dyke laments that there are no more woods around – “They’ve all been built on,” and their little destination is surrounded by new subdivisions and apartment complexes.
News of the closing saddened one of the pub’s early bartenders, James Redman. Son of British racing legend Brian Redman, James moved from Jacksonville to St. Augustine many years ago to work behind the bar just after the King’s Head opened. He called it a “fantastic place, a dream that was brought to reality.”
“I hope you can now relax a bit,” Redman wrote in a farewell to Dyke. “Lots of love, hugs and kisses. Working for you were some of the best years of my life.”
Word of the pub’s imminent closure has resulted in very busy final days — Saturday night was so busy that the pub ran out of food, and Hartley-Frew was out at dawn last Sunday restocking. But the crowds will be gone as of 5 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 15, when Kings Head closes its doors for the last time.
“Hopefully somebody will buy it and keep it as a pub. It would break my heart to see it pulled down to build houses or whatever,” Dyke said. “…I don’t know what’s going to happen is the honest truth. We had four people who were interested, then once it went in the news, we now have a lot of people who are now interested. We are just going to see what happens.”
And as she was surrounded by well-wishers getting their last bit of Brit last Sunday, Dyke said she won’t really retire when the kitchen closes and the taps shut down for good in a few days.
“I don’t know the meaning of that word. I go in my garden as often as I can,” Dyke said. “… I don’t know what I am going do. I just want to relax and do nothing for a bit, and I want Elaine to stop working and for her to travel with her fiancé, and I will just stay home with my Siamese cat, Lily. She runs the household — it will just be her and I.”
The pub remains open from 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily until Sunday, when it closes its doors for the last time at 5 p.m.
