Putney branch is not on the latest list of twenty threatened with closure


Byron Burgers on Putney High Street. Picture: Google Streetview

The local branch of Byron Burgers appears to be safe from imminent closure as its name is not on the list of those threatened, which include a number of London restaurants.

The upmarket hamburger restaurant chain has been in difficulties recently. Media reports say landlords in some areas have been asked to reduce rents.

Byron has 67 outlets across the UK, and twenty are under threat of closure as part of a restructuring package by KPMG.

The list includes Aberdeen, Birmingham, Bristol, Camberley, Cardiff, Glasgow, as well as some in London Hoxton, Spitalfields, Wandsworth and Westbourne Grove) two branches in Manchester, and Windsor.

Last year the company closed four under-performing sites and Byron’s investors hired management firm KPMG to undertake a strategic review and assess the short and medium term options for the business.

The Putney branch on Putney High Street opened in 2011.

Byron was set up after Tom Byng spent a four year stint in America as a student where he "ate enough hamburgers to sink the Titanic." When he returned to London in 2007, he felt there weren't any restaurants offering burgers like those at his favourite American diner, The Silver Top. He is sometimes referred to as the "bourgeois Burger King."

The restaurant was named partly after the poet, and partly because 'byron' is Old English for cowshed.

January 25, 2018