The Greasy Beaver Lodge is back, baby. The famous flat sign was resurrected three weeks ago, after the tenants made a request to their property manager.
Annabelle, one of the current tenants, said that her flatmate emailed Cutlers over Christmas and said “it would make my Christmas dreams come true if you put the sign back up.” It didn’t happen in time for Christmas, but a few weeks ago Cutlers sent a maintenance man over to put the sign back up. “We woke up and the sign was back up. It was great.”
“The guy who put it back up didn’t realise what it said until he put it back up and took a step back,” said Annabelle. “He blushed when he saw it. A lot of people do.”
“When I first met the tenants they really wanted it to be put back up, so we put it back up,” said Matt Cutler, of Cutlers Property Management. Cutlers took over managing the Greasy Beaver from Jenny Adamson at the end of 2020.
“We were always going to say we’ll just put it up ourselves, screw the uni or whoever decided to take it down,” Annabelle said.
The sign was taken down at the end of 2019. Then-property manager, Jenny Adamson, described it as “offensive” and said that it did not “depict nicely what the flat is about.” She also said that “landlords should have a say” in what the flat was called.
The current tenants are still “unsure” about why the sign was taken down in the first place. “We’ve been told multiple different things,” said Annabelle. She lived in the flat last year, when the sign was taken down.
“When the sign got taken down our flat looked pretty boring from the outside,” Annabelle said. “When we got the sign back, we could finally say we’re in the Greasy Beaver and everyone knows immediately where we’re from.”
She said that even her mum likes the sign, after initially seeing it and thinking she would never let her daughter live in a flat like that. “Everybody’s family and friends in the flat were just heartbroken when it was taken down,” she said.