This Forest cafe was a hotspot for travelling celebrities in the 60s - and has now been restored to its former glory.

The Silver Fox Cafe, in Newnham, is on the A48, which was the main route into Wales before the completion of the Severn Bridge.

This meant that it was in a prime location, and was visited by dozens of celebrities - including The Beatles, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor - before trading dropped in the 1970s and it was abandoned.

But the cafe is now back on its feet, under new owner Malcolm Ward, who bought the building in 2020 and is determined to keep all the charm of the original establishment.

“I was looking for a project, and had thought about setting up a fifteen or twenty seat cafe in a station, but then I saw the cafe,” said Malcolm.

“It wasn’t actually for sale. It was abandoned when I saw it and I just decided that I wanted to try to buy it. It was bought under a company name, so it was hard to find the owner.

“When I did, I just knocked on his door and said ‘do you want to sell the cafe?’. He was in his 60s and was looking to downsize, so I made him an offer. I didn’t see inside the cafe until after he had given me the keys.”

Once he had removed the boards from the door of the cafe, Malcolm was finally able to get a look inside.

With no floors and eleven broken windows, the cafe was in need of renovations, which took Malcolm - who is a builder by trade - an entire year to carry out.

“Absolutely everything needed doing,” he said.

“I put scaffolding boards over the timber beams in the floor so that I could get around, but because of the broken windows, they were always wet floors. Every time lorries went past, rain would get splashed inside the cafe.

“I removed all of the wallpaper and replaced the windows. We also took down the entire chimney place and a large brick wall.The place is completely rewired, replumbed, there are new skirtings, and plasterboard on the walls.

“I actually ended up keeping the scaffolding boards as the floor, as they looked good and do the job.

“Once the renovation was all done, we were given a five star rating from the EHO (Environmental Health Office).”

The cafe reopened its doors in July 2021, and many former customers have since returned.

“We have people coming in everyday saying they used to come here in the 1960s,” said Malcolm.

“I’ve even got one customer who says he was here the day Richard Burton visited in his white Mercedes.”

Richard Burton wasn’t the only celebrity to have visited the cafe, with The Who, The Rolling Stones and Tom Jones being among the famous faces passing through.

Shirley Bassey was a frequent diner at the Silver Fox over the years, and first visited when she was a child, travelling with her dad, who drove stone out of Wales to build motorways.

The young star became “firm friends” with the staff at the cafe, and purportedly even helped out in the kitchens.

The Beatles were also visitors to the cafe - and tour manager Freda Kelly, who was with them at the time, has even returned to the Silver Fox since Malcolm reopened it.

“Freda said that one day she had woken up and decided to do what she did in 1964,” said Malcolm.

“So she went to Lydney, where she had gone then, and one of the ushers at the town hall mentioned that we had reopened, so she decided to visit.

“Then in the post the following week, she sent us her own personal photos with The Beatles, which was amazing.”

Another Beatles connection to the cafe is a receipt that was found in the pocket of one of Ringo Starr’s jackets that was auctioned off.

Shortly after buying the property, Malcolm found out about even more of the cafe’s history, including its origins - with it having been a smokery in the 1800s and breeding kennels in the 1940s.

“In the field by the cafe there was a tannery at one point,” he said.

“There was an overhead cable and I didn’t want one there, so when I was digging the trench to get rid of it, I found a big old Victorian brick tunnel that supplied water to the tannery.

“It also was breeding kennels for thirty or forty years, which is why it’s called the Silver Fox,” he said.

“Some elderly customers can even remember there being foxes in the cages on the riverbank.”

The cafe now opens seven days a week from 9am to 5pm.