The former Beefeater restaurant in Ross-on-Wye will no longer be officially classed as a pub, meaning it can be more easily put to other uses.

The Travellers Rest on the Ledbury Road closed at the start of July, as part of a national programme by owner Whitbread Plc  to either sell off or redevelop dozens of such outlets.

Just before this, Whitbread had put in planning applications for certificates of lawfulness, reclassifying it as a restaurant rather than a pub, based on food sales having made up most of their revenue for over a decade.

In planning law, a change of use becomes accepted if it can be shown to have been the practice for over ten years.

With a ‘use category’ of their own, pubs have special protection in planning which is not extended to restaurants.

A representative of CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale which attempts to protect threatened pubs, objected to Whitbread’s moves saying that the Travellers Rest “is and always has been a pub in the accepted sense, i.e. somewhere you can go to just buy and consume a drink. It is not, and never has been, a restaurant.”

In accepting Whitbread requests for the Traveller’s Rest, planning officer Joshua Evans concluded, “The internal configuration of the premise was primarily utilised for the purpose of food consumption with limited provision for consumption of beverages.”