RESIDENTS have launched a campaign to save their local pub after it was provisionally sold to unnamed buyer.

The Fairview Inn in Headington, Oxford, is currently owned by Enterprise Inns but after more than half a century as a local pub it was put on the market earlier this year.

A buyer for the pub in Glebelands now looks to have been found and a deal is expected to go through within the next few weeks.

But residents fear it could stop being a pub due to the way it has been marketed.

Glebelands resident Darren Grant said: “We are running a campaign to keep it as pub and we have applied to register it as a community asset.

“A lot of things go on at the pub. There are the usual sports events with a football team and a darts team. It is not a dying pub.

“The only other pub nearby is the Corner House on Horspath Driftway.

“We want the Fairview to stay as a resource for the local community.”

The pub is currently listed on the Fleurets website as being sold subject to a contract being signed.

Fleurets, a property company which specialises in pubs and restaurants, describes the Fairview Inn as being in a “prominent” corner location with “alternative use potential”.

A spokesman for the company would not reveal who the buyer is.

In the meantime, the campaign group is holding a public meeting in the pub next Tuesday at 7pm, to discuss ways in which it could be saved.

The Fairview Inn was built by Reading-based brewers H & G Simonds and opened in September 1959.

Despite its young age the Campaign for Real Ale considers the pub to be a historically important one.

It is listed on CAMRA’s National Inventory of Historic Pub Interiors as having “wonderful” full-height wall panelling.

If the pub were to be sold for another use, it would be far from the first pub in the county to have been lost in recent years.

Issues such as high beer prices have meant about 50 pubs have closed in the last five years across Oxfordshire, including 20 in the city.

Watering holes that have gone include the Fox and Hounds in Abingdon Road, the Chester Arms in Iffley Fields and the George Inn in Botley Road.

Enterprise Inns was last night unavailable for comment.