St Aldates Tavern, Oxford

The entrance of St Aldgates Tavern leads to a parquet floored front seating area where tables run up the left and right-hand walls. This is a small pub with a bar counter mid-way along the left-hand wall and a raised flagstone floored seating area at the rear. During my recent Tuesday evening visit the upstairs area was out of bounds due to hosting a private function, or maybe it was closed due to the low footfall. Downstairs are the toilets, and in the gents was an interesting scene in the cubicle where an empty ice cream pot with wooden spoon atop sat in the middle of the floor next to an empty Boots wrist support box… nothing to see here… move along. Premium keg was available alongside a Beavertown lager and six of the seven hand pumps were in operation drawing XT Brewing’s Chameleon and Heron, White Horse Brewery’s Black Beauty and Village Idiot, TT Landlord and Oakham’s Citra. The service was friendly and the atmosphere welcoming so I’d pop back in if passing.

This was originally the New Inn (the name can still be seen to a passage at the pub’s right) and amazingly dates back in some form to at least 1397. Although I lived in Oxford for seven years, I only came here once before on our PuG Summer 2016 Oxford crawl and it’s largely as described below. There’s a Victorian-meets-hipster interior, with some details probably dating from the 1930s, along with bored games and TVs with the sound off, showing the tennis; piped music is a little loud for comfort. Probably due to its close proximity to an arterial bus stop, the pub seems to appeal as much to Town as it does to Gown but also to tourists. The ale range varies depending on which day of the week you visit; visit early in the week (when footfall is lower), the range is limited. However, visit later in the week and you can experience a far larger range, including the likes of XT Animal, Hooky Gold, Tribute or Oakham Citra at a reasonable £2.40 the half and good, served by very friendly bar staff. This is a worth inclusion on a crawl, but the dependence on TV sport is a bit of a minor deterrent; the Royal Blenheim down the road offers a more authentic pub experience with a superior ale range and is off the tourist and Town trail.

This is a cosy and compact single room pub with a good central location close to Christ Church College. The pub has a lovely herringbone patterned parquet floor, walls painted in a warm colour scheme and a high ceiling dotted with fancy light fittings. A row of tables and chairs runs down each side of the room, supplemented by a drinking ledge to the right with some high stools, and a short L-shaped banquette under one of the front windows. The room’s centrepiece is probably the attractive fireplace, which stands to the left, just before the servery appears midway into the room. The bar counter has a sweeping curved end, fronted by nice wood panels, all in front of a rather pedestrian modern bar back. The place has gone for a contemporary version of a traditional pub, and this is perhaps best reflected in the décor and furnishings, which include some very cool looking old lamps, lots of miscellaneous pictures around the walls, a trophy cabinet with various bits of sporting equipment next to it, several mirrors, some old barrel ends and a couple of TV screens, one of which was showing a muted football documentary for the benefit of absolutely no-one. The pub does run a way beyond the bar, but seating back here seemed to be pretty limited and no-one was sat back her. There was a good collection of board games stacked up in the front window and the clientele ranged from elderly ladies dining, young students reading in front of the fireplace and a few lecturer types. A decent indie soundtrack played at an unobtrusive level throughout the course of my visit. A cheery barman greeted me and poured me a fine pint of Oakham Citra from a cask range that also included XT25, Animal Ice Kings, St Austell Tribute and Hook Norton old Hooky plus a Lilleys cider and an unused pump. The Citra was in excellent condition and was definitely befitting of the pub’s Good Beer Guide inclusion. This seemed like a very nice little pub doing all of the basics pretty well. I felt very welcome and comfortable sat here with my beer and paper and could happily have spent longer here if the opportunity had arisen. I perhaps doesn’t quite have the ‘wow’ factor of some of Oxford’s more prominent historic pubs, nor quite the ale range of a top alehouse, but I enjoyed my time here and would definitely recommend it as a quiet bolthole away from the tourists and shoppers that dominate this part of town.

Attractive city-centre pub, albeit less interesting inside than one might hope with a heavily modified bar area and partially opened-out room beyond. However, the selection from the seven handpumps included Flying Monk Pendulum (£4.55), a couple from Loose Cannon as well as XT3 (one of the regular beers from that brewery).