The Dragon, Nottingham

I pop in here quite a lot as it is opposite my bus stop home from Nottingham. Always full with drinkers, I have never had a bad pint here, although the selection is pretty mainstream. The toilets are always clean, a good thing if you have a 30 minute bus ride in front of you. Some nights there is a guy spinning vinyl and taking requests. Good to hear some Scar, Two Tone, Northern Soul, punk and Motown in a way that it was intended. the volume is acceptable, you can still have a conversation over a pint of Adnams, Castle Rock or Shipstones in bottles. True, there are much better pubs in Nottingham, but non so close to the 36 bus stop. If you go in, check out the window frame to the outside world, it is made from stone and has a sepia hue. In one small spot, someone has cleaned it to it's original colour and it should be white! Surprisingly, this tiny pub has a beer garden out the back, primarily for smokers, but if you catch it on a night that is not too occupied, it's really good to sit in.

The Dragon’s small frontage suggests that this is going to be a tiny, cramped city centre pub, but in fact, whilst it is admittedly very narrow, the room stretches back surprisingly far, with enough space to cope during peak times. You enter into the lowest level of the pub which is used as a seating area and has a mix of bench, standard and high stool options. There are a few steps up to the bar area and the room actually narrows here which made it a bit of a choke point at times during my visit. The servery is on the right and there are some banquettes opposite with a small collection of cacti on display behind them. The paint scheme is fairly plain, with the odd mirror breaking up the wall space and some nice lamps above the bar, but otherwise there’s not that much going on. A TV screen had been turned off and loud music was playing in its place on my late Tuesday evening visit. More steps beyond the bar take you up and out to the covered patio area which has a good amount of seating squeezed into a relatively small space. The pub has made it into recent additions of the Good Beer Guide, despite having stiff competition elsewhere in the city and just the three hand pumps of its own. These were dispensing the seemingly permanent selection of Castle Rock Harvest Pale and Adnams Broadside and Southwold Bitter. I tried the Harvest Pale and had no complaints about the quality of the pint. I think this pub lacks something to make it memorable, be it the beer range or the interior or the general ambiance. It’s a seemingly safe bet for a decent pint if you’re on a city centre crawl but frankly there are plenty of more interesting venues just a short walk from here.