Design students light up with ideas for smokers' balcony

The first floor area above the toilets at The Olive Branch will enable licensee Jack Harding to cope with the smoking ban from July 1.

The innovative scheme was among the six ideas presented to Mr Harding by the City and Guilds interior design students from Northbrook College in Worthing.

The 12 students met Mr Harding last weekto present their solutions to the crackdown on indoor smoking. He said: 'I particularly liked the idea of putting the smokers above the garden.

'This will allow the smoke to go upwards without interfering with anyone. With some awnings, the idea will look very nice.'

Another design to pep up the garden of the North End Road pub also caught Mr Harding's eye.

This continued the pub's interior decoration into the exterior area by using Italian-influenced designs from areas such as Tuscany.

'It will be a complete refurbishment of the garden,' Mr Harding said.

'It will involve putting in a children's area, an outdoor games area, a flat screen TV and seating for an extra 70 people.

'With a water feature, and heated and lighted parasols, and taking away the storage bins, that will be a nice area.' The improvements were costed by the students at 26,000.

Mr Harding, who has run the pub for just over four years, said the ban on indoor smoking would present a major challenge for licensed premises.

'I expect the ban to improve my turnover in the end by ten per cent because it will make conditions better, and eating and smoking don't mix, but I think there will be a dip in trade in the first few months.

'There will be a hardcore of smokers who will stay at home and buy their beers from Tesco. We need to find ways to make smokers comfortable outdoors.

'You don't want a crowd of smokers standing outside the door so that people coming in for a meal have to walk in and out through all their smoke,' he explained.

'If that happens, you will lose all your non-smokers and meals are very important to pubs nowadays. You don't make much money from drinkers.'

Course leader Kathy Harrison said the students were aged from 16 to middle age.

'For a lot of the students, this project was a huge learning curve. Their first reaction was that they could not meet such a short deadline but they realised at the end that it could be done. This has given them a lot more confidence to tackle future projects.'