From Butlers Wharf to Buxton
The closure of Butlers Wharf Chef School hit him hard, but John Roberts was never going to let all the good ideas go to waste. London's loss is the University of Derby's gain, as Tessa Fox discovered.
This time last year, John Roberts was reeling from the closure of Butlers Wharf Chef School. The training centre close to London's Tower Bridge that had promised to tackle the industry's skills shortage in a fresh, enlightened way and that he had directed from the day it opened in November 1995 until September 2000, was no more.
Even now, Roberts finds Butlers Wharf an emotional subject. He says he couldn't face walking past the site and seeing the tables in the school's training restaurant, the Apprentice, still laid up as they were for service on the day the doors were locked. He hates to think of the jobs lost, the fledgling careers of students disrupted, and the wasted effort of everyone who had been involved.
In reality, however, it hasn't been a waste. Roberts is seeking to replicate elements of Butlers Wharf at the University of Derby, where he is dean of the School of Tourism and Hospitality Management. When he talks about the ambitious plans for his school, which he hopes will become a Centre of Vocational Excellence, he snaps out of despondency and is hardly stoppable in his enthusiasm for the project and what it will bring to the hospitality sector. His passion for the industry that he says he still loves "warts and all" is evident.
If everything goes to plan, the school, currently housed on two separate sites 35 miles apart, will begin the move in September 2003 to a single campus in the former Devonshire Royal Hospital buildings in the centre of Buxton. The expanded school will be able to take more than 3,000 students and will offer courses on hairdressing, beauty, travel and sports and recreation as well as catering. It will be open year-round - "Why should people have to wait to start training at a specific time of year? Why can't there be more flexibility?" argues Roberts - and its facilities will be available for hire by outside organisations for conferences and exhibitions. There will be specialist kitchens and a cookery and wine demonstration theatre; full-time and day-release courses will lead to NVQs, HNDs or degrees and there will be specialist short courses for more experienced people.
Crucially, says Roberts, there will be an emphasis on practical skills: "The qualification, dare I say it, is less important than what that person is actually able to do."
Enter the second and even more ambitious part of the plan: to open a four-star, 70-bedroom hotel and spa just minutes from the new campus in September 2004. The Crescent hotel and spa - so-called after the building in which it will be housed and, Roberts believes, the first hotel training facility of its kind in the UK - will be run in partnership with the local council. It will be a commercial operation managed by professionals, but in which students will learn real-life skills through work placements. (It's a proposal not dissimilar to the one planned in Southwark for Butlers Wharf that never came to fruition.) There will be a 90-cover fine-dining restaurant, a 70-cover brasserie, spa and function facilities as well as student and staff bedrooms. Any trading surplus will be re-invested in the premises or go towards training.
The university is looking to raise £8m to get the new campus up and running. It has already secured more than two-thirds of that from funding agencies, Roberts says, but the search is on for private individuals, companies or charitable trusts interested in backing the venture financially.
It's not just about big bucks, though. Roberts is hoping to set up an associate chef programme in which professionals can give practical support - such as checking course content, giving occasional lectures, or mentoring a student. Anton Edelmann, executive chef at London's Savoy hotel, has already lent his support in this way by agreeing to head an advisory group of chefs who will help with such issues as training, kitchen design and staff selection.
While it may be convenient to see the new school as another attempt at Butlers Wharf, Roberts insists that this one has a far wider remit: "You could say this is Butlers Wharf written 50 times larger but it'll be much more.
"Universities have generally been criticised for being too academic but this one is genuinely different. It believes that tourism and hospitality is a growing area and when I heard the plans, I thought, ‘that's brilliant, it's exactly what I've been arguing for for years'."
Roberts's convictions have indeed been honed over a career that has never seen him stray far from training. Interested in cooking from an early age, he gained a chef's diploma at Westminster College and worked in the kitchens of the Savoy, the Dorchester, the Connaught and Le Caprice before becoming involved in youth work. This sparked an interest in training, and lectureships at catering colleges in Worcester, Newcastle upon Tyne and Rotherham followed.
The academic holidays provided time for Roberts to develop other interests. He pursued a love of travel by being a volunteer consultant in catering and tourism for the British Executive Service Overseas (BESO), worked as a catering officer in the Territorial Army, and managed sites for an adventure holiday company. He even wrote two books while running the catering department at Rotherham College in the 1990s.
It was while at Rotherham that frustration about how colleges were run set in, however. In November 1995 he was lured to the brand new Butlers Wharf Chef School (see panel) to be its inaugural director. "It seemed, and proved, to be what I believed training should be about. I was excited about starting something with involvement from serious restaurateurs and industry people. I thought ‘this is what it should be about, this is going to work'."
The closure of Butlers Wharf in March 2001 has failed to dent Roberts's belief that the approach to training the school offered - practical, linked to industry, commercial - is the best one. And he is evangelical in his determination to whip up and, crucially, to retain the support of industry that is essential if his current project is to succeed. "I don't want anyone to turn round and say ‘you're a bit out of touch' or ‘that sort of thing was all right four years ago'. I want this place constantly to reflect what's going on in industry and that requires ongoing involvement from industry."
Roberts's conviction, determination and passion are persuasive. Whether he can convince the industry that the new school and hotel represent the fresh, enlightened approach to training he believes hospitality needs remains to be seen, but it's unlikely he will rest until he has achieved his dream.
School of Tourism and Hospitality Management, University of Derby, Harpur Hill, Buxton, Derbyshire SK17 9JZ. Tel: 01298 28322
Butlers Wharf Chef School: What went wrong?
A combination of insufficient financial support and a costly location spelt the end last year for Butlers Wharf Chef School.
"The school was under-funded from the start, so I spent much of the first year convincing people it could work," Roberts says. "There was a grant for the conversion from Docklands Development Corporation, bits of funding from Southwark Council and help with the rent [it was waived for the first five years of the 10-year lease]. It was very staff-intensive and, because it was linked to certain restaurant groups [the original idea was Sir Terence Conran's] some people thought it wasn't for them."
So at what point did it become clear things were going seriously wrong? "The day Southwark closed it," Roberts says. He explains that the school was presented with a rent bill three times the original sum in September 2000, a reflection according to Southwark of the increasing fashionability of the location. "At the same time the board was discussing a buy-out with a number of possible partners - one was the University of Derby - and I had negotiated a big European Social Fund contract which would have helped."
Though it always struggled financially, the school was showered with accolades, competition medals and media interest during its five short years. A high-powered board gave its time freely as did professional chefs who did demonstrations.
The key lesson from Butlers Wharf is the importance of investment from industry, he argues. "There's a whole problem about how training is funded but basically if the industry wants training that responds to its needs, investment is required from industry as well as government."
