Peter Wooding

A GAMES shop owner is searching for customers who went in his shop while infected with Covid-19 at the start of the pandemic three years ago as part of a legal battle with an insurance company.

Peter Wooding, owner of the Orcs Nest in Covent Garden, is one of thousands of firms to not be paid out for loss of business because of fine detail in policies. The small-print battle involves insurance companies claiming shops that had to shut during the pandemic did so because of the government rather than the disease itself.

It has left businesses like Orcs Nest, which Mr Wooding set up in Earlham Street in 1987, having to prove an infectious patient was in the shop before the first lockdown measures in 2020. It’s not an easy task because at that stage testing was not readily available.

Mr Wooding said: “I’ve always had insurance on the shop since we opened it in 1987. Of course, we didn’t expect there to be a pandemic. But when it came I checked and it said we were insured if we had to close down because of diseases. But it has turned out to be all about a sentence that says we have to have closed ‘as a result of notifiable human disease occurring at the premises’. Basically we have to prove Covid occurred in the shop, not simply worldwide, or we don’t get paid.”

He added: “It turns out it is just a lottery as to what words were in your insurance policy. I know someone that said the disease could be ‘within five miles of the business’, and they got paid out.”

The dispute over insurance claims has seen legal cases reach the Supreme Court and some insurance firms are understood to be requesting non-disclosure agreements, NDAs, are signed in settlements to prevent court judgments setting precedents for thousands of policy holders across the country.

The Orcs Nest has a legendary status among Tolkien types and Dungeons and Dragons devotees. Mr Wooding said the business had in recent years witnessed a boom in sales of “intellectual” board games as the younger generation turn their backs on pubs and clubs in favour of a night in solving puzzles, strategising, building ancient cities or outing saboteurs in hidden-identity guessing-game challenges.

Mr Wooding’s insurance company was contacted for comment by the Extra. He is urging anyone who had Covid-like symptoms who visited the shop between January and March 2020 – before the first lockdown – to make contact at nestmail@orcsnest.com