The roughly 14,000 residents of Ipswich, Massachusetts, probably didn’t expect four-time Grammy winner Ed Sheeran to host a pop-up in their small coastal town to promote his new single, “Old Phone,” but that’s exactly what the English singer-songwriter did, in the form of a cozy pub. For one day only—Friday, March 28—fans flocked to the temporary establishment to hear Sheeran perform while drinking Guinness and noshing on classic bar fare, including roast beef sandwiches and french fries. The musician offered AD a sneak peek of the immersive setting, which doubled as the location for the song’s music video.
The space, built by Pink Sparrow, was done up as an authentic pub, like the ones found throughout the UK and Ireland. An old-fashioned wood-paneled bar, brown leather booths, a dartboard, and dark green walls lined with memorabilia decorated its interior. At the heart of the pub, overlapping vintage patterned area rugs anchored a lounge area where Sheeran performed.
Locals began to speculate early last week when a structure called the Old Phone Pub began taking shape in a parking lot of the town’s historic district. Then, Sheeran confirmed his plans during an interview with Jimmy Fallon on March 26. “It’s a full working pub,” he told Fallon before debuting the song from his upcoming album, Play. “The music video is basically the build of the pub with everyone locally,” he explained. “And then to get entry into it, you have to go on your old phone and find an old message or a video that means a lot to you and send it in, and then afterwards we’re going to project them on the walls.” Sheeran told Fallon that the idea for the song occurred to him while looking through messages and photos in—you guessed it—his old phone.
“We wanted the Old Phone to feel like it had always been there, albeit suspended between worlds—part Ipswich, UK, part small-town New England, and part something more imagined. It was rich with layers—architectural and emotional—and had to do a lot at once: support a performance, create intimacy, and tell a story,” Cat Garcia-Menocal, Pink Sparrow’s creative director, tells AD. “It needed to perform like a cinematic environment but also feel emotionally grounded, like a pub you’ve always known. That push and pull between the real and the constructed, between architectural realism and emotional storytelling, was central to the design decisions we made.”