How not to run a pub

It’s the late 80s in Birmingham city centre (or maybe it’s the early 90s — it’s hard to date a story as electric as this with too much accuracy). Two suspected MI6 operatives walk into the Gunmakers Arms pub, wearing ties with Windsor knots. They’ve come for a quiet word with the landlord: Peter Macleese. They know exactly what he’s been up to.

Macleese, who was standing at the bar as they entered, later described the conversation as a “smack on the bottom”. No further consequences, but please don’t do it again. The landlord had indeed been a little naughty, accepting a $1 million offer to head into the Colombian jungle and assassinate the King of Cocaine, Pablo Escobar, on behalf of a rival cartel.

"You don't get asked to assassinate Pablo Escobar unless you have got the right experience,” the SAS-operative-turned-mercenary-killer (turned publican) would later say, with some understatement, during the documentary Killing Escobar. But the mission failed, Macleese’s helicopter clipping trees en route into the jungle, leaving him with four broken ribs but no scalps. 

Macleese died two years ago, having long-since left contract killings and pulling pints behind. The Gunmakers Arms remains though, now one of the city’s most iconic pubs, resplendent in its Grade II-listed glory on Bath Street for more than 200 years. And last year it got another unusual owner: Northfield-born artist Mason Newman.

Newman bought the pub to great fanfare. Aged only 27, his career to that point had been marked by remarkable success in the art world. Last year he reached a new peak with a successful collaboration with Ozzy Osbourne, and his pop-art style pieces often sell for between £30K and £50K. Those who know him say he would talk about picking up the phone to Sharon Osbourne any time he liked. Newman has also collaborated on fashion collections with Topman and Madonna and his Instagram page shows his unique sartorial flair: there are leopard print trench coats and lots of fur. In 2024 he was recognised in Forbes’s 30 Under 30, with a short write up suggesting he had earned £700,000 in a year. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his maximalist tastes, he planned to create no ordinary boozer. The Gunmakers Arms was a fairly traditional pub before he arrived, but the idea was to turn it into a shrine to Rock ‘n’ Roll — as well as to himself. He would fill it with his own artworks and create seven ‘themed’ rooms upstairs. "It's like Chateau Marmot [an artistic Californian hotel] slash Chateau Denmark [Soho Hotel] from London in Birmingham,” he said at the time.

Some of his artistic choices raised eyebrows. There was, for example, a large gold-framed piece he hung up on the wall, with a quote in neon lights: “Every anarchist is just a baffled dictator”. The line is widely attributed to the fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, which one regular at the pub in its previous iteration described to the Dispatch as “a bit of an odd choice”. Completing the piece was the war flag of the Italian Social Republic (the eagle clutching a fasces over the Italian tricolour, again associated with Mussolini’s WWII fascist regime).

Alongside the decor, Newman and business partner Matt Burns (older, with grey hair and trademark thick-rimmed glasses) decided the pub’s name could also use an update. It was Burns who came up with the winning suggestion: Mason Newman’s Gunmaker’s Arms. Modestly, Newman initially thought the new name was too much, but in an interview with Birmingham Live he described how it began to “grow” on him.

In another of his pre-launch interviews — this one with Sigil Radio presenter George Hadley — Newman issued a tongue-in-cheek warning: “Give an alcoholic the keys to a boozer and you’ll see what happens,” he said. Still, Hadley was convinced Newman was onto a winner. “I popped down there earlier and fucking hell, I'm just blown away from how much like it has changed and changed in a good way,” he tells his interviewee. “The carpet, the walls, the artwork, it's just got so much sauce. It's so sassy, bro. Sauce! It's so good.”

“I think you’re gonna have a seriously big 2026,” Hadley then assures the new publican. The pub was closed in six months.