Wetherpoon pub in Harborough has reopened its kitchen after after it lost thousands of pounds of trade due to flooding.

The Sugar Loaf suffered a massive blow after its flooded kitchen was shut over Christmas and New Year.

But now the Wetherspoon pub said that after a couple of weeks of closure, the kitchen is now open.

The back end of the 210-year-old building was flooded on Friday December 20 after 48 hours of rain hit the Harborough area.

The High Street pub’s kitchen was knocked out of use over the hectic, lucrative Christmas and New Year holiday following the drama.

The pub’s called in a number of local contractors to try to tackle the serious problem but the kitchen’s still closed.

A spokesman for Sugar Loaf owners JD Wetherspoon told the Harborough Mail: "The kitchen is now re-open and measures have been put in place so we hopefully shouldn’t need to have any more kitchen closures whilst contractors carry on investigation works for the flooding.

"The rear end of the pub and the garden however are still closed off to customers for the foreseeable future."

The Sugar Loaf building was founded by local businessman Thomas Goward way back in 1810 as a grocery shop.

Goward’s traded at the site for 100 years until 1910 as staff weighed out provisions and cut sugar by hand from a conical-shaped sugar loaf – hence the pub’s unusual name.

In a warehouse behind the store, staff blended tea, ground coffee, chopped sugar, ground spices and washed and polished dried fruit for sale in the shop.

Thomas Goward lived over the shop in a large household, which included his wife and three daughters, three of his shop men and two domestic servants.

The successful shopkeeper later moved out to live in a villa in Victoria Avenue, Harborough.