Bar On The Brink: Hockley’s Neon-themed bar given ‘new lease of life’ after teary-eyed video goes viral

On January 1st, Neon was on the verge of closing for good, but one social media post changed everything.

From one TikTok video, and a “desperate” plea for help from the community, came an outpouring of support from strangers across the country.

Peter Russell, 33, owner of Neon, said business was “never as good as we expected it to be”, but eight months after opening the bar’s problems culminated when they only took in £5 across a seven-hour shift.

“I was feeling so overwhelmed and broken,”

-PETER RUSSELL

“On the first day of the new year, a Wednesday, we opened our doors and in the whole seven hours we were open, we took £5 – That’s when it really hit.

“We were taking losses of a couple hundred a night just for opening, and I just felt so defeated,” he added.

Just two weeks ago, the owner sat in the empty bar looking at the place he’d built by hand on a “quarter of what most bars have to build”, and said the future was looking bleak.

“I was feeling so overwhelmed and broken, I didn’t know what on earth I was supposed to do,” he said.

Although Peter admitted the ‘obvious’ decision was to close the doors for good, the bar owner and manager took first to social media to post a single video.

“I was just shouting into the void, more to release my own emotions and as therapy than to see any results,

“I thought maybe I would get one or two comments.”

But the TikTok account Peter created, ‘Bar On The Brink’, did much more than one or two comments, and within the night the video amassed tens of thousands of views.

Peter described the night his video went viral, and said: “I remember being on shift after the first video got posted, first it got 100 views and I thought ‘Oh my God’, but then it got 500 and by the end of the shift we were on 60,000.

“Three days later, we hit half a million views.”

His posts did not stop there, with the owner taking to the platform again and again asking his newfound community what the bar’s problems were and what he should change.

“I thought we might have just saved this business with this one silly TikTok of me practically crying,”

-PETER RUSSELL

Commenters agreed that the Neon bar stools ‘were uncomfortable’, and the same day Peter decided to get rid of them.

Others told him the bar wasn’t ‘noticeable enough’, so he installed ‘Beavertown’ barriers outside to help.

“Seeing that alone, I thought we might have just saved this business with this one silly TikTok of me practically crying,” he said.

“I have something to work from now – there’s so many people commenting with words of encouragement and it all feels like a new lease of life for us.”

Peter’s TikTok account now has 3,818 followers, has received 43,600 likes and has over 750,000 total views.

This success has brought even more attention to the bar, with the owner admitting he’d had an outpouring of support from locals and individuals hoping to help the failing business.

Website designers, social media influencers and DJs are among those who offered free services to Neon, but one message in particular has been the fuel to jumpstart the bar’s next big event – A Valentine’s Day Drag Night.

With the possibility of future events on the horizon, Peter said: “I’ve got all sorts of plans, when we pull this off and we’re back in the green, I’m going to buy a keg of each beer we do and it’ll be on me.”

Success seems to be within the reach of Neon once again, with the bar reporting it “sold out” of alcohol completely last week and had to close its doors early.

On social media, Peter said it was a “fantastic start”, and highlighted that the bar had gone from serving ‘next to nobody to ‘using a fortnight’s worth of stock in one night in January’.

“We can really make this work,” he said.