The County Hotel, Hexham

GBG listed hotel bar built into a ground floor corner and so an L shaped room and counter. Entering from the main revolving door brings you into the short arm of the L and a room mainly set up for casual dining, the counter has three pulls and a T-bar. Round the corner is the longer arm with a side entrance door and is split in half. The front half has the counter and some high seating while the back is a formal dining area. Another three pulls with the same beers, Wainwright, Landlord and Hadrian and Border Tyneside Blonde, the T-bars and three solos have a standard lager/cider/Guinness + John Smiths line up from Heinekin. There’s a small snug at the front right.

A prominent and attractive looking building towards the end of Hexham’s High Street, it’s got plenty of colourful hanging baskets on display and has the appearance of a traditional coaching inn with white painted brickwork along with grey detailing around the windows and doors. It’s a good size internally and divided in to several different rooms. It’s clearly been refurbished recently and is thus rather contemporary in appearance and in some areas has something of a bling factor with elaborate crystal light fittings. The main bar area had some type of parquet wood flooring, further wood cladding on one of the partition walls and wood cladding along the front of the var counter. The tables too were chunky wooden affairs which might all sound rather rustic, but the freshly plastered ceiling, feature wallpaper on one wall along with a large photograph of the now sadly lost tree at Sycamore Gap, and some wood panelling painted in a gastro-pub green made it feel considerably less so. The rear room which looked to be more geared up for dining had much more painted wood panelling as well as fitted and curved padded bech seating, whilst one of the rooms at the front was a little cosier with a tartan style carpet on the floor. Overall though, whilst not at all unpleasant, it all seemed a little bland and characterless. Beers on tap were London Pride, Timothy Taylor Landlord and Tyneside Blonde whilst the solitary cider was Thatcher’s Gold which was a bit of a turn-up and much better than the usual dross you get around these parts.