Jake Oppon on opening up a bar on the roof of Oxford's Varsity Club

Upon seeing The Varsity Club in Oxford’s High Street for the first time, we knew it was a fantastic site and had great potential.

A beautiful tall, slim building over three floors, which used to be The Escape nightclub, is an old townhouse with bare brick walls and steel beams.

It did, admittedly, take a while to uncover its true potential under the layers of old tiles and paint but uncover it we did and were finally satisfied with the lighting and decor around October last year when we opened as a cocktail lounge bar, which has really taken off.

We even hosted the first Oxford Fashion Week catwalk show in March.

By February we had realised it was too good a space not to open in the day as well and so began offering daytime coffee and cakes.

Then the hard work really began! The top floor had an unassuming flat roof, accessed only by an emergency ladder via a dark dingy doorway, but once up there, the view – oh, the view!

In-between Carfax tower and St Mary’s Church tower, you are among and surrounded by the dreaming spires of Oxford, above the symmetrical roofs of the Covered Market with breathtaking views out to the surrounding hills.

But in order to open this as a stylish addition to the current three floors, it has taken more time, energy, sweat and tears than we could have imagined.

A staircase had to be crafted off-site and installed, and a steel framework had to be designed and carefully fitted over the entire floor before the decking could be laid.

The glass couldn’t be ordered until the vertical stands were built and very precise measurements taken down to the final millimetre.

All this was done in rain and shine.

The lighting, furniture, bar design and logistics are on-going.

It can sometimes feel that the number of decisions is overwhelming.

We have just this week hired a general manager and our new chef is working hard on designing our food menu.

This is one example of just how important it is to build a great team around you, from bar tenders and baristas to graphic design and marketing, to make sure the vision we had when we first saw the building could become a reality.

Now we are so close and it is genuinely exciting, taking over our lives ever so slightly, to the extent that it is hard to think or talk about anything else!

There is the maxim that ‘if it is easy or straightforward, then it would be boring’ and we have learned so much over the last few months and hope that we have risen to the challenges we have encountered.

We are now taking bookings and look forward to seeing you up on the Roof at TVC very soon.

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TVC, 9 High Street, Oxford, OX1 4DB. Call 01865 248777 or see tvcoxford.co.uk