Urban Pubs and Bars is London’s largest independent pub group. Founded in 2014 by Nick Pring and Malc Heap, the group is now a 65-site portfolio with annual sales over £100m. They closed 2025 in the Sunday Times Best Places to Work, then opened 2026 by acquiring five pubs from Brunning & Price, four all-day venues from Albion & East, and The Birdcage in east London from BrewDog.
No two venues in the estate feel the same. Bat & Ball is a full-on activity bar of ping pong, karaoke and darts. The Salt Yard Group serves Spanish-Italian tasting menus at Ember Yard and its sister sites. The traditional pubs, scattered across London from Clerkenwell to Kensal Green, hold tight to their neighbourhoods. Creator content has to speak all those languages.
Urban partnered with Joli to run the programme centrally: brief, match and report across the group from one dashboard. The content reflects the breadth, from date-night reels at Ember Yard to ping-pong clips at Bat & Ball to pub-lunch coverage at the traditional sites.
That variety is the point. Rather than one group campaign, Urban gets a constant stream of venue-specific content, each piece reaching the audience most likely to walk into that site. New venues land with a creator strategy pointed at them from day one, and the Urban team stays lean at the centre while the creative surface area expands with every acquisition.