London pizza chain Yard Sale Pizza has taken over the former Pizza Hut site at 55 Lavender Hill, bringing their neighborhood-focused approach and in-house delivery service to the area.

Pizza seems to be the thing that always works. We’ve recently seen a bundle of new pizza places open – including CoreCore (now trading on Queenstown Road), Common Pizza (open on the Common) and Rudy’s (opening soon near the station). But we did, unusually, lose one a couple of months ago when the small Pizza Hut delivery kitchen at 55 Lavender Hill suddenly closed its doors.

It did a decent trade, so we did wonder what the plan was. REFuze, who specialise in smarter-than-usual refits, then came in – suggesting whoever was taking the premises over was going to be a somewhat smarter and more ‘designer’ effort than usual. They rapidly dismantled absolutely everything on site – to reveal that the unit was rather larger than we’d previously thought.

And we can now confirm that the unit has been taken over by Yard Sale Pizza, who started out in 2013 and have grown to a dozen or so venues around London. Yard Sale are an interesting business who have done some unusual things – they deliberately go for cheaper locations in local neighbourhoods, rather than big showy city centre sites, they keep the places small and crowded (never more than 20 or so seats), and above all they don’t use Deliveroo or UberEats’ delivery services.

They offer a mix between Neapolitan and New York-style pizza, as well as loads of collaborations with other brands to keep things interesting (generally featuring specially designed pizza boxes). Several rather niche pizzas have built them a cult following (think Marmite cheese garlic bread).

Unlike the Pizza Hut – which was really a kitchen and a small counter – there’ll be provision for eating on the premises, including on their small front terrace, with a full license.

There’ll also be a takeway and delivery option. Yard Sale specialises in a really solid in-house delivery service – which they run by themselves rather than relying on third party firms and apps, meaning they don’t see 34% cut go to some another company.

Because they run their own deliveries, most of which use electric bikes, they have a clear interest in the pizzas arriving while they’re still fresh and decent – rather than going on a mystery tour round south London and turning up an hour or so later; their typical order-to-delivery timescale is just 24 minutes. You’re also much less likely to find the delivery driver’s identity completely fails to match the profile on the app!

Yard Sale also have a particularly strong and somewhat unique line in ‘satellite distribution’ – where they become the food option for kitchen-free pubs and bars that don’t do much or any of their own food. This is a clever business model where the other venues nearby are essentially an extension of Yard Sale’s own business (and it’s one Bunce has written an interesting detailed article on).

They work with independent pubs and bars in an area – and do a deal where they provide smart-looking menus on the tables – as well as beer mats that look like pizzas, and other marketing material – and then take care of all aspects of the delivery – orders, payment, and getting the food to the customers’ tables, without the pub or bar having to do anything.

It seems to work for everyone: it keeps people in the pubs when they get hungry rather than seeing them decamp to a food place – and the pub gets a cut of the sales. For Yard Sale it means one small and fairly low-rent restaurant location, with just handful of tables, can also have half a dozen or more much larger satellite venues in the wider neighbourhood that are also selling their pizzas.

Not many pizza places do this: you need to build up a really good relationship between the businesses, and you really need your own in-house delivery service for it to work, who need to be super reliable, generally well-presented, and prepared to hold up the standards of whatever venue they’re delivering to. It’s no good having a load of pushy and stressed-out Deliveroo riders on a borrowed account who’ve never taken a delivery from Yard Sale before showing up hours late and barging through the wrong pub looking for somewhere they can dump some tepid pizzas. But for Yard Sale, who have done the hard work to get this to work, it has clearly worked very well.

We don’t have details of what the new Lavender Hill venue will look like yet. But they don’t make the shops all look the same – a look at their current branches (which includes one in Earlsfield, pictured above) shows a wide mix of designs, maybe taking a leaf out of now-much reduced Byron’s book. They also specialise in arty and interesting retro signage (albeit with a bit of an orange theme) – we suspect whatever turns up will be interesting for their immediate neighbour Signtair who specialise in custom shop signage.

This is part of an expansion of the chain, having got financial backing to grow the business beyond its North & East London roots to include south London, and maybe further afield. Like any small chain that finds a good opportunity and goes for growth they’ll face the age-old challenge of staying fresh and different – and of keeping the quality up across a larger number of branches – but the Lavender Hill site suggests they are staying true to their roots so far by focussing on small spots in busy, inner city residential areas.

It’s a good development for Lavender Hill. And this site is likely to do well for Yard Sale, with the old Pizza Hut unit being squarely in their target market, and with a proven and a clever business model that’s a bit different to what many of their competitors do.

Yard Sale Pizza will be at 55 Lavender Hill, Battersea, London SW11 5QN. It looks as though there are a few weeks of work still to do before they open. If you’re interested in local pizza places you should see the article published on lavender-hill.uk about a month ago on CoreCore just round the corner, and we suspect they’ll quickly do a deal with newly-opened and somewhat special Czech brew pub the Queens Arms also just round the corner – which we’ve reported on here. 

This article was originally published on lavender-hill.uk.