The Blue Bell, Kidderminster

The Blue Bell is an L-shaped Bank’s pub with a laminate floored area to the left where there’s a pool table and two dartboards. A carpeted bar area is found to the right where a serving counter up the left faces banquettes that run up the right-hand wall. There’s a jukebox, but during a recent Thursday evening visit it was off in favour of an Ant & Dec gameshow. Standard keg was available, but the lone hand pump was unused, although keg Bank’s Amber was available. There were only four or five other people in the pub and I think some of them were actually staff. I decided to knock back my half of generic lager and leave them all with their pizza delivery.

I’ve no idea how this two bar local’s pub on the Northern fringes of the town centre ended up on my itinerary, but it was comfortably the most disappointing pub of the many I visited in Kidderminster. The original two bar layout is probably the pub’s stand-out characteristic and on entering I found myself in the left hand Public Bar – a slightly tatty room with a pool table and dartboard to the left and a small servery over to the right. A banquette runs along the front wall and there were a couple of small tables with low stools squeezed in elsewhere, but the room is essentially given over to pub games and had been commandeered by a loud group of youngsters whose intolerable nonsense forced me to take my pint through to the Lounge Bar. This room turned out to be surprisingly well kept, with a decent carpet and a larger servery along the left hand wall. Several curved settles create nice communal seating areas around the three remaining walls and are supplemented with a few low stools. The room has floral wallpaper, a few old local photos on display and an inflatable banana on the bar back, as well as a pump clip collection which briefly raised hopes of good beer, only for them to be quickly dashed. Other points of interest included the reasonable beer garden, skittish pub dog, loud Friday night music and ramshackle collection of insanely pissed locals – family friendly it ain’t! Despite the pump clip collection, prominent CAMRA material and a sign over the bar saying a pint of cask ale costs £3.10, there was no real ale available on my Friday evening visit, so I ended up having to choose between keg Banks’s Bitter and Mild (I went for the Mild which was just about passable). One of the oiks in the Public Bar asked for a pint of Fosters, only to be told that this was also unavailable but he could have a can of Fosters for the same price. I assume something went wrong with their delivery, or else the pub is being run into the ground. On face value, this is a nice enough local working man’s style boozer which I’m sure I would’ve appreciated more had I visited when they had some decent beer on. But having said that, the atmosphere was pretty edgy, mainly because everyone seemed to be completely trashed, which would certainly be off-putting to the casual pub goer. Possibly one for a revisit at a more convivial time, but in all honesty it’s the first place I’d want to cut from any future crawl around town.