The Tap on Tower Street, Harrogate

Now being run by new operators, the old Tap & Spile has had a complete modernising make over that will not be to everyone's taste. The three room layout remains, the public bar to the left, doubles as a bottle shop with fridges laden with bottles and cans. Seating here is generally at tall stools and there is a drinking shelf along the front wall. The former lounge now has tables and chairs and operates as a food and drink space for the all day food offer, with a choice of cheeses, pizzas, pies, meats and noodles. The former pool room is also laid out with tables and chairs and shelves groaning with various board games. Naturally a trendy grey paint job predominates, is it still trendy or a bit passé? Each bar has four hand pumps with the same beers sometimes in each bar, sadly the quality isn't as good as before on those occasions when it was right. The front patio area has seating reclaimed from wooden pallets, the rear garden has more conventional seating.

This is a charming back street pub easily reached from the town centre, but rather sleepy on my Saturday evening visit. The entrance has doors to either side, with the right hand option leading into a spacious lounge bar which is part carpeted and part bare boared. Standard tables and chairs make up the majority of seeing options here, although there is a decent looking L-shaped banquette in the rear corner. Bare stone walls to the front and a nice tiled fireplace to the rear with a pub mirror above, help give the pub an authentic traditional feel, further enhanced by a series of historic black and white photos throughout the room. There is also an upright piano, although the sombre atmosphere on my visit made me wonder how long it was since it was last used in anger. Meanwhile, the left entrance takes you into a simple front bar with limited seating options, a large TV screen and an encouraging pump clip collection. A blackboard on the end wall also listed the full ale range. A third room can be found to the rear left, housing a pool table and some subsequently cramped seating options as well as a serious continuation of the pump clip collection. Music played quietly throughout my visit and a docile pub dog wandered around looking lost before hiding under the banquette. The ale range was pretty strong for a quiet back street pub, which made me wonder if I had happened to catch it at a bit of a bad time. The options available on this visit were Roosters Yankee, Exmouth Ale, Cottage Thunderbolt and Full Throttle, Brains The Awakening, Purity Mad Goose and something from Batemans. The Yankee couldn't really be faulted and it was served by a friendly enough landlord. I really liked the look and feel of this classic traditional back street pub, especially the sharp contrast it provided to the Saturday night madness unfolding a short distance away on the town centre. It was a shame that the pub was virtually empty, as it struck me as the sort of place you could probably easily fall into conversation with the locals. A well kept pub and one that I would be keen to revisit at a busier time.

This Tap and Spile is a medium sized pub and once inside here the pub was really nice with a good choice of real ales on the bar i had a drink of York Stonewall and this was a really nice drink the other beers were Roosters yankee, Hexamshire Devils Elbow, Theakston Old Peculiar and London Pride. This was my favourite pub in Harrogate on my short visit. Pub visited 16/7/2007