The Greystone Arms sits on the corner of Harbourfront Parade and Chandler’s Row, and it has been a public house since 1881. The brown brick is soot-darkened. The etched-glass windows bear the name of a brewery that closed in 1937. The dartboard in the back room has been replaced four times. The bench outside — Reg Garside’s bench, as everyone in the Docklands calls it, though the council installed it in 1993 — faces the river.

Walter Trent, sixty-two, has owned the building since 1998, when he purchased the freehold for 38,000 florins. He announced his retirement on the thirtieth of April and put the building up for sale three weeks ago. The assessed value is approximately 92,000 florins.

Two offers are now on the table.

The first, submitted in late March, came from Gerald Moss of Moss & Hartley Property, whose Midtown offices overlook Caldecott Square. Moss’s portfolio includes three former pubs on the south side of the river. All three have been converted to commercial premises — a solicitor’s office, a recruitment agency, and something described on its signage as a “co-working space,” a term that means approximately nothing to most residents of the Docklands.

The second offer arrived on Friday. The buyer’s identity has not been disclosed, but Trent confirmed on Monday that the offer is from a local individual who intends to operate the premises as a public house.

“I’ve had two offers,” Trent said, wiping the bar with the same cloth he has been wiping the bar with for twenty-eight years. “One wants to keep the pub. One wants to keep the building. There’s a difference.”

He declined to disclose the terms of either offer, except to say that both were “in the right area.”

Patrick Seldon, foreman of the Docklands Workers’ Association, whose members hold their informal Friday meetings in the back room of the Greystone Arms, was direct.

“That pub is the last gathering place in the Docklands that isn’t a works canteen or a church hall,” Seldon said. “If Moss buys it, it becomes another office. If someone local buys it, it stays what it is. The arithmetic isn’t complicated.”

He was asked whether the DWA had any financial involvement in the counter-offer.

“No,” Seldon said. “But if whoever’s made it needs a hundred men to drink there on opening night, I can arrange that.”

Moss, through a spokesman, said that any suggestion his offer was not in the community’s interest was “premature and unhelpful.” The spokesman added that Moss & Hartley’s Docklands conversions had “created employment and improved the commercial environment.”

Reg Garside, seventy-four, who has sat on the bench outside the Greystone Arms every morning since his retirement from harbour piloting in 2009, was asked whether he had an opinion.

“I’ve had the same opinion since March,” Garside said. “A man who turns a pub into an office is a man who doesn’t understand what a pub is for.”

He adjusted his cap.

“A pub is for sitting in. An office is for leaving.”

Trent is expected to make his decision by the end of the week. The buyer’s identity may become public at that point. In the Docklands, speculation is robust. Names have been mentioned. None have been confirmed.

On Monday evening, the bar jar at the Greystone Arms — which collected 340 florins for the Bellvue Theatre repair fund last month — contained a handwritten sign:

UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT (HOPEFULLY).

Trent says he did not write it. He also says he has not removed it.