Fisherman’s Wharf: New Southend restaurant to replace ‘bombsite’

Fisherman's Wharf, a former fish restaurant on Western Esplanade, was pulled down in 2018 amid promises of a new and improved restaurant on the site. 

However, “disastrous” deals and funding issues have left the prime spot looking like “a bombsite”.

Where the once popular glass-fronted restaurant stood, there is now a wasteland of overgrown weeds, haphazardly strewn construction materials, and broken fence panels.

Now Terry Tibble, whose family owns the business, claims a new deal is being worked on which will see work start and a new restaurant open “at the end of the summer”. 

Mr Tibble, 73, from Rayleigh, said: “I agree it’s a mess down there. We didn’t want to shut at all. We had a bloody good business, but circumstances have really gone against us.

The site as it looked shortly before the restaurant's demolition in 2018. (Image: Newsquest)

“It was our livelihood, our family business. If I’d known this would happen, we would never have knocked it down in the first place.”

Mr Tibble says negotiations are underway to sell the site to a construction firm, who will build the new restaurant and sell it back to his business. 

He blamed the six-year delay on two failed attempts to raise funding.

Mr Tibble added: “We had £1.8 million of funding on the table ready to go in 2018, so we knocked down the old restaurant thinking we’d open the new one in summer 2019.

"Unfortunately, the people we were dealing with for funding had financial trouble, so they pulled out."

Concept - how the new restaurant was originally planned to look. (Image: Emptage Architects)

In 2020, the pandemic forced the project to stall. Mr Tibble was also struck down by a serious illness at the time. Another attempt in 2022 failed when a different lender pulled out. Mr Tibble says the whole ordeal has likely cost him up to £750,000.

He added: “It’s not a case of us not wanting to do it, we haven’t been able to. All we wanted to do was build a beautiful new restaurant.”