Martin Roberts, presenter of BBC's Homes Under The Hammer, returned to The Hendrewen hotel and pub in the Rhondda Fawr valley and got a bit of a surprise. One of the team working on the site was Logan Davies.
Logan was one of the young people that Martin is helping to achieve 'real life' work experience on a building site at his renovation of The Hendrewen in Blaencwm via a partnership with Abercynon based company Realskillz.
Emotional reunion at the pub
Martin says: "I didn't know that he was coming back to the Hendrewen, I didn't know he'd be there, and I walked in and said 'Logan!' and he looked around and said 'Martin!'. It was amazing for him to be back there, working and in paid employment and helping us save the pub. He's completely changed his life and all the lives of those around him."
Project director and builder at Realskillz, Steve Davies has been taking young people to Martin's building site over the last three years as part of the delivery of one of the company's core missions - offering learning through community based training and work experience.
Full circle connection
After Logan's time with Realskillz he was employed by Concrete Structures and Floor who are one of the major contractors at Martin's pub, but Martin was unaware of this 'full circle' connection. Seeing Logan again and to hear that he is doing so well at the company has had a profound effect on Martin.
"They say he's a wonderful young man and a wonderful employee," Martin says, "He is one of the most hard working, diligent and loyal, all those brilliant things you want in a person you employ. He could have easily gone the other way but he seized the opportunity to learn, so to see him back at the pub was genuinely wonderful, it gets me quite emotional."
Giving back to the community
One of Martin's core values at the renovation of The Hendrewen into a pub, restaurant, hotel and community shop is to give back to the community in a partnership where he feels the Rhondda valley communities have supported his efforts to reawaken the much-missed establishment.
He says: "Trying to give back to the community, especially young people, means the building and project has such a greater purpose, it's not just a place that I'm hoping to rejuvenate, it's also about trying to bring back something to an area that really needs support and if you can focus that around young people, then they are the future, but they're the ones that are having a really tough time everywhere.
"There's never been a greater need for these types of opportunities so if I can use this project, which is so close to my heart, and in the process benefit young people who might not otherwise have an opportunity as well, then that's brilliant, isn't it? The project is already doing good before it's opened and that's wonderful."
When the kids come to the site they're brilliant, they're not bad or anything, they just haven't been given the right opportunities at school for them. And it's amazing the number of people who I talk to say, 'that was me, school wasn't really for me' and these are highly successful people now who can remember who gave them that first chance, who believed in them.
Martin is very clear that Logan's recent success is down to the young man himself, grasping the opportunity RealSkillz and Martin gave him and taking what he has learnt into the workplace, and then working very hard to learn and develop.
"Logan is just one of the ones we know about, but hopefully there are others who just needed a little push in the right direction at a fork in the road in their life between two different routes; where somebody, somewhere said something or did something that made a massive difference to the rest of their life.
"I just know that others who have been at the pub will have taken that opportunity, there's other lovely stories out there too, but I'm so proud of this young man. With the help of Steve at Realskillz, Logan has got a real job earning good money and learning new skills. It's a path in his life which will be such a positive for future life, for the next generations, his wife, his children."
Future plans for hospitality training
Martin says the food, drink and rooms side of The Hendrewen will also be used as an opportunity for young people to gain work experience in the hospitality and catering side of the business through links with local colleges, including a plan for learning alongside celebrity and well-known chefs.
Martin explains: "Who knows, we might just discover the next Jamie Oliver, Michael Roux or James Martin. I just feel privileged to have a vehicle that I can use for that, because it's a win-win-win for everybody."
The renovation of The Hendrewen hotel and pub located at the top of the Rhondda Fawr valley within the hillside village of Blaencwm began in 2022. After finding out the establishment had struggled through the Covid-19 pandemic leading to its closure and the loss of a much-loved community hub, Martin stepped in and bought it.
The purchase was a bit of a surprise to Martin's wife Kirsty and family, and is widely considered as a wonderful good news story for the development of tourism in the valley, especially when coupled with Martin's support for the re-opening of the Rhondda tunnel as patron of the Rhondda Tunnel Society.
Since then, as with most renovation projects including the many hundreds Martin has covered on BBC's Homes Under The Hammer, there have been triumphs and there has been trauma, from the production of CGI images that reveal what an amazing transformation is on the horizon to bad weather and the even worse condition of the building once it was peeled back to bricks.
Never exactly saying when the hotel and restaurant are going to open through years of experience of knowing what a rollercoaster ride such an epic renovation can be, Martin says: "After a painful period of unforeseen delays largely beyond our control we are now 100% back on track. We'll definitely be open by the summer next year, so that is the plan and we are actively working on it again now."
