England fan who built English pub in Germany to host supporters

An Englishman who bought the contents of a British pub and rebuilt it on the outskirts of Dortmund will watch England tonight with his regulars.

Property developer Paul Moss snapped up the fixtures and fittings of derelict The New Crown when they were offered for sale on eBay five years ago.

The 52-year-old employed two labourers to help him strip everything out of the pub in Bridlington, East Riding of Yorkshire, and packed beer taps, mahogany bar, original signage, stained glass windows, brass rails and everything else except the pub’s ‘sticky carpet’ into a shipping container. 

Once it reached the town of Iserlohn, a 30 minute drive from the centre of Dortmund, he then spent 18 months rebuilding the pub on the site of a former Greek restaurant.

England will play the Netherlands in their Euro 2024 semi-final at the city’s BVB Stadion this evening and Mr Moss will be watching at the bar.

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‘We’ve been busy throughout the tournament, and with a local festival taking place recently, so hopefully we’ll have another crowd in tomorrow.

‘The football fans are good, they come in and drink copious amounts of beer, but I think we’re just a bit too off the beaten track for the travelling England support to pay us a visit.’ 

He said he took on the challenge of building an authentic British pub in Germany, Moss said: ‘I hate German bars because they’re all a bit sterile, shiny and covered in chrome. The old sticky carpet, dark wood, warm bitter on a winter’s day is what you get from a British pub.

He said that normally the vast majority of his customers are local Germans who also ‘love the idea of an English pub’ in the former garrison town.

But during the Euros it has been a beloved watering hole for up to 30 Englishmen per game, he said, and has even been paid a visit by some of the original punters who used to drink at the pub in Bridlington.

Posters for music gigs performed at the ‘old’ New Crown, darts trophies, an original Tower Hill tube sign and paintings of Queen Elizabeth and King Charles all decorate the pub’s wooden walls.

He has draped the pub, which has a red telephone box in the beer garden and Black cab parked outside, in hundreds of metres of St George’s cross bunting.

Mr Moss is originally from London, but settled in the Iserjohn in the 1990s after a holiday romance with a ‘beautiful’ woman from the town, who became his wife, Heike, also 52. The couple have two children who are both away at university.

The Crown serves full pint glasses of beer but with metric measurements printed on the side.

‘A pint is 0.56 litres, but Germans always order half a litre. You won’t get that here; we fill it right to the top,’ Moss laughed. ‘You wouldn’t get a proper pint of beer anywhere else.’