Snooker pro Joe Perry whose earnings from the sport range from £225 in 1993-1994 to £250,000 in 2014-2015 (his best year), has opened his own pool and snooker hall in his town of Chatteris. Joe and his partner Penny Richardson have spent upwards of £150,000 to transform the former Pera Pera Turkish restaurant in Market Hill.
The project won the support of a £5k Rural England Prosperity Fund (REPF) grant, administered by Fenland for Business.
Joe, who has won an impressive 771 of his 1,373 professional games, said: “This has been something we have wanted to do in Chatteris for a long time and we have been looking for the right premises for quite a few years.
“With snooker I have travelled the world, but Chatteris has been my home and base since my parents moved here when I was fourteen.
“I still have all the same friends I grew up with and the town is a magnet for me. Wherever I go I always want to be back here.
“There is not lots of things to do here and when I realise how much snooker brought to my life, not just as a career, but a hobby and all the social side of it, I wanted to offer that to people in Chatteris too.
“I had opportunities to set the club up further afield, but it just wouldn’t have felt right to me.”
Rural England Prosperity Fund grants, open now for funding bids of up to £10k from businesses in much of Fenland , are administered by Fenland District Council’s Fenland for Business team.
The fund aims to improve productivity and strengthen the economy in areas Government has identified as being rural and therefore, it says, facing potential challenges of lower productivity rates, poorer connectivity and poorer access to key services.
It created the fund to support rural communities and new and existing rural businesses to develop new products and facilities that will be of wider benefit to the local economy.
The grants are delivered by Fenland District Council economic growth team Fenland for Business. It is funded by Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority from the Government’s Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).
The £5k award to Joe Perry’s Pool and Snooker Palace has allowed the purchase of five new pool tables.
Joe says this means the club can offer a top-quality experience from the opening rather than the alternative, which would have been to offer used tables in the first year or so until the business got established.
Joe Perry’s Pool and Snooker Palace opened on Wednesday, coincidentally two years to the day of one of his most proudly won tournaments, the Welsh Open.
The business has created eight jobs.
Businesses can put themselves forward for a Fenland Rural England Prosperity Fund grant of up to £10k today. Apply at: https://www.fenlandforbusiness.co.uk/REPF
You can look at Joe’s impressive career statistics here:
https://cuetracker.net/players/joe-perry/career-total-statistics
