If the owners of London’s Cumberland Hotel ever decide to refurbish the soulless basement they refer to as a “business centre”, they could do worse than to consult Neil Tibbatts. With almost three decades of leisure industry design and architecture under his belt, the laconic Brummie is well-qualified to bring a breath of creativity to the faded mausoleum in which we meet.

With the national rail network still ringing to cries of ‘Euston, we have a problem’, Tibbatts has suffered a rage-inducing drive down the M1 to meet me, unwelcome stress for a man who, less than two years ago, was diagnosed with a blood infection and heart condition which put him out of action for over six months.

“I had surgery and it was touch and go for a while” he reflects of the illness which marked the end of a short career as a leisure operator, when he found himself in competition, in England’s second city, with many of his clients. The bar nailed onto the side of his office building was, in fact, his for some 18 months in the mid 1980s, before he sold it to Midsummer Leisure entrepreneur Adam Page. When European Leisure later acquired Midsummer, Tibbatts bought the lease back, closed the venue, doubled its size and relaunched it in April 1999 as The Jam House. The concept was based on the House of Blues in New Orleans and r ‘n’ b guru Jools Holland was brought in, following a introduction via impresario Michael Gelardi, to oversee the club’s entertainment content.

“The Jam House was doing really well, but essentially, I’m no operator” Tibbatts says, “nor do I want to be! My illness had started to take its toll and we had to decide what to do with it. To do more would have meant raising a lot of money and we had several offers to buy it from people in the industry. So we decided to sell, to Luminar, and they’re currently looking at sites to do more, which we’ll be designing.”

Tibbatts, once a renowned bon viveur but now more careful with his health, looks fit and well. His relaxed air cloaks a fierce dedication to his craft which, in a career which has had its fair share of ups and downs, has placed him at the pinnacle of leisure design and brought him clients that range from the country’s biggest brewers to its smallest bar-owners and won him acclaim and awards world-wide.

Neil Tibbatts was born in Birmingham in 1949. He attended the local secondary modern school and the Bourneville and Birmingham Colleges of Art until the age of 21. He has never left the city he loves, either to live or work. “I’m used to being called a second-class citizen” he jokes, “but there are serious benefits, such as cost and communication links. Our clients are all over the country anyway. We grew a lot in the Maggie era and debated opening a London office, but never did.”

The newly-qualified Tibbatts worked for various local architects and shopfitters, before forming a partnership with Mike Gibson, now also a respected leisure design consultant. They worked successfully together for 7 years and parted amicably when Tibbatts & Co. was established in 1979.

“We started with 4 people and just grew & grew” he recalls. “Our client base then, as now, was entertainment companies, plus some foreign business such as international hotels and Julianas discotheques - I’ve built nightclubs on most continents.” Around the time of feminisation of pubs in the early 1980s, Tibbatts work in nightclubs caught the eye of brewers such as Bass and Whitbread and he began to work on “fun pub” concepts as well as other brands such as Beefeater steak houses.

In 1983, the company started to encompass architecture as well as design. The work piled in and Tibbatts & Co. was working flat out on designs for hotels, tenpin bowls, casinos, restaurants and leisure parks, including the seminal Point complex in Milton Keynes, a joint venture between Bass and US cinema operator AMC. By the end of the decade, turnover had hit £14m a year and the company was employing over 100 people. An office was opened office in Vancouver to service Whitbread, who had bought a company called Keg Restaurants.

And then - bang!

“At the end of 1989” Tibbatts says pensively, “I had lunch with Nick Tamblyn [now MD of Chorion, then at First Leisure]. He said he reckoned the economy was in total freefall. I thought ‘What’s he on about?’ But he was right - in three months, it bloody was! We had a rolling programme of work and, just one after the other, everything got chopped. It was very, very bad. We’d never experienced a downturn, so we had no planned way of reacting to one. Up until then, our biggest problem had been finding enough staff! Our world fell apart. We were sacking people dozens at a time, sending cars back, selling stuff - it was terrible. And in 1991, we went bust!”

Tibbatts, “on auto-pilot”, instantly launched an emergency rescue plan to try to save face with those clients who had on-going projects with the company. “I got some money together from my mother and from a client who gave me £30,000 and rushed around the country, reassuring clients. I did a deal with the liquidator to buy back our work in progress, plus some office equipment. All our clients stuck with us except one, who pulled a 25-bed new build hotel, a £20m project.”

Tibbatts confesses to an element of naïveté, which he partially blames for the company’s demise. “We thought we could walk on water, as did a lot of others in the 80s. Everyone believed that the only way was up.” He started up again the same day, as Tibbatts Associates, with 18 of his staff intact. The first 3 years was a struggle - “work was scarce, it was a hard slog” - but the company now boasts 40 people, with the majority of clients still in entertainment and leisure, including Luminar, Chorion, Esporta, London Clubs International, Bass, Scottish and Newcastle and some smaller operators such as Honeycomb. Outside of leisure, projects underway include a town centre redevelopment for Richardson Developments, creators of Birmingham’s Star City and Fiveways and the cutting-edge Printworks in Manchester.

A current major scheme is S & N’s cajun-themed “Dave ‘n’ Busters” clone “City Limits” in Madrid, an under-one-roof destination venue incorporating tenpin bowling, a jazz bar, Old Orleans restaurant and amusements. Most of Tibbatts’ overseas work comes from UK-based clients and he foresees more work coming from the Continent as the leisure park concept increases in popularity. “UK operators are attractive to overseas developers” he says, “and some operators feel that this country is saturated now, particularly in cinemas and bingo, so it’s a natural progression.”

“The operator I’ve enjoyed working with most is Nick Tamblyn on Tiger Tiger” Tibbatts says, considering the question for a mere fraction of a second. “Chorion know what they want and there’s no timewasting debate and committee decisions. At some clients, there’s 20 people all pitching in and protecting their corner - it becomes a tortuous process. But at Chorion, you have a direct line, decisions are made on the spot and you can move forward quicker.”

Tibbatts view of current leisure trends is that plus ça change, plus c‘est la même chose. “Everyone I meet says ‘What’s new in leisure?’ but there isn’t really anything new - it’s just a recycling of the same formulae. In the catering field, ethnicity is the thing, in bars, it’s modernism. The current UK trend is for cocktail bars, style bars, with a blended look of minimalism and glamour. Some brands have had their day and concepts like Yates’s Ha! Ha! are now out-All Bar One-ing All Bar One - maybe you don’t get 10 years out of a brand any more. Perhaps there should be a restaurant chain called ‘meat’ - after all, ‘fish’ is doing well!”

Discussing iconic designers, Tibbatts makes it clear that he is an admirer of “the daddy of them all” Terence Conran. “Out of his firm came people like Rodney Fitch” he says. “When I started, there wasn’t really such a thing as a design firm - there were interior decorators, shopfitters and architects. But firms have spun off from Conran and spun off from the spin-offs from Conran…there are at least 10 firms that have spun off from us!” Drawing contrasts, he names Phillipe Starck as a “designer designer”: “People like Conran you admired because they became big names and made lots of dosh - with Starck, you admire the novelty, the panache. For all I know, Starck may have an office full of people and not do the design himself, but he comes across as a true designer rather than a businessman.”

Tibbatts Associates’ current fee turnover ranges between £2m and £3m a year. He has no thoughts of flotation, on the basis that the design business is not capital-intensive and there is little requirement for outside funding, and would appear to welcome a measure of rationalisation. “There’s an oversupply of designers now,” he says, “and that is putting a lot of pressure on fee levels. I’m totally open-minded about either buying businesses or selling mine. Many of my people have equity in the company and we are actively working on succession planning. I want to see the people who work for me growing in confidence, in stature and gaining client recognition - they will be the ones who eventually take over the reins. I encourage them to bond with the Regional Managers and Operations Directors of client companies.”

Our chat ends with an uncharacteristic degree of scorn cast over leisure trade associations. Tibbatts has even stopped going to BEDA meetings: “I thought they were a waste of time. And I went to the last BISL event and everyone was either an accountant, someone from a local authority on a day out or some consultant - the only operator I saw was [Cannon’s Chief Executive] Harm Tegelaars. These organisations may be useful for political lobbying, but not for much else!”

Neil Tibbatts’s conversation is as colourful as his designs. He may have some controversial views, but they are nothing if not entertaining. A man who is never afraid to speak his mind, one can only hope that his refreshing spin on the industry will prevail and that he continues, second time around, to prosper.

My favourites

Food: Thai

Car: “My current one - a souped-up 5.5 litre Mercedes G-Wagon”

Overseas place to visit: Rome

Hobbies: Sailing, skiing

TV show: “Have I Got News For You” and “A Touch Of Frost”

Movie of all time: “Don’t Look Now”

Book: “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley