Help us survive a flood caused by the NHS above our shop

HI, I’m Steve from Imperial Games Limited, (Imperial games) I run a small friendly local gaming store, we sell everything board game, tabletop game and card game related, plus a huge range of collectables for Disney, Star Wars, Marvel, Anime etc.

Our store is home to hundreds of local people who use it to play games, socialise etc, for some it’s the only place they can go to do this, and some it’s the only place they go to socialise, many neurodivergent customers tell us if it wasn't for our store, they would spend all day at home.

It is a thriving business, hundreds of games played each week, however, the gaming room does not support the costs of keeping it open, that’s what the shop does, or rather did, until now.

On Monday 13th of Jan, we were struck by a downpour of water caused by a broken pipe in the NHS above us, initially this caused a few thousand pounds worth of damage but were able to remain open and so could soldier on.

But then, despite the NHS knowing about the leak, they refused to turn the water off and on Wednesday the 15th of Jan the ceiling came down, destroying much more stock and equipment like furniture and computers. And because this happened overnight the entire shop was soddened in damp, ruining 90% of our stock.

We have had the insurance assessors in now and they have confirmed 90% will be gone, we will have also to replace all the shelves, the counter, the carpet, the ceiling, almost everything, (maybe even a rewire of the electrics)

Now while the insurance will compensate us for the lost product and fixtures, and even for loss of sales during the period that we can’t trade, we are concerned that with no money coming in we can’t pay staff and bills like rent and utilities. We are also worried that insurance claim will take so long that we will lose a lot of our customers and essentially have to start from scratch, we might not survive.

That’s when someone suggested we do a go fund me, and see if the local community can rally around, and of course it has global reach for those who have a spare bit of cash and understand our situation and can feel for what we’re trying to continue.

It has been suggested that we would be able to use this money to cover the things that the insurance won’t cover, like money from missing events, food and drinks expiring while we are closed, any items not covered in the insurance (we have been told they might not be covering the cost of the carpet!)

So please help, we need it, they need it, we just want to survive so we can continue to provide this awesome space for our gamers.

One more picture, its a bit blurry as I trying to avoid getting wet

I would like to add I do not want to see any abuse or negative comments towards the NHS, I have only mentioned them as we want to make it clear that this is not our pipe, and therefore was out of our control. the NHS is important to me on a personally level, but thankfully like us, they have insurance.