'Radical hospitality' business The Long Table (TLT), which operates a pay-what-you-can restaurant and hit national headlines this year when it was given marching orders from its popular home in Stroud's Brimscombe Mill, is getting ready to serve up food in a new location – at Cirencester's fomer House of Fraser store.

Alongside bicycle repair and sales charity The Bike Drop, the affordable meals project, co-founded by celebrity baker Tom Herbert in 2018, says a preview tour of what it has in store at the former department store has now sold out.

In a prime retail spot at number 29 to 35 on Cirencester's Market Place, the former department store was shuttered back in 2019 amid speculation that the site could, to the potential horror of prestigious retailers that surround it, become a discount store.

But TLT's parent organisation, the Grace Network, which operates a community hub at Brimscombe Mill and which also runs projects including The Furniture Bank, The Bike Drop and Stroud District Kidstuff, has now indicated that both TLT and the Bike Drop will imminently be up and running at the site, having signed a 15-year lease.

The impressive Cirencester address is understood to be owned by a bank, and builders are still finishing work on the property, including repairs to the roof. The Grace Network has indicated that it hopes to have both social enterprise schemes operating in October after plans were initially pencilled for April 2024.

Mr Herbert said: "We see that there's both an appetite for what we offer, there's a need for what we do and there's people to hire. It feels very close to our heart and we can't wait to get open here."

In the meanwhile, uncertainty continues over the Grace Network's tenure at Brimscombe

Mill, just east of Stroud, after it was sold in February this year and the new owner gave the enterprise group notice to quit as part of its plans to use the site as a warehouse. S0me 50 jobs are said to be at risk and the enterprise said it invested £300,000 over five years in transforming the derelict site into a hib for its business.

A statement in its website says: "Despite there not being a definitive answer to our warehouse conundrum, we want to tell our community that we are still very much open."

But with reference to the new Cirencester project it adds: "Work has now started on our kitchen build out which means we can invite you to eat with us very soon."