The Lamplighter, Shirehampton, Bristol

St Austell pub acquired via their buy-out of Bath Ales. Impressive looking building, painted a powder-puff bluey green. Said colour carries on inside which is a fairly small oblong room splitting to a small pool room and an upper dining area off right. Everyone was preoccupied with Sunday lunch service and it took a while to get served. My choice from the two pumps of Bath Gem and Tribute was always going to be the latter and I got a good half (NBSS 3.5); was GBG listed for a number of years but appears to have recently dropped out. Shirehampton is hardly a thriving metropolis so this pub serves the locals to a decent standard but it's nothing the hardened pub ticker won't have encountered hundreds of times before. 6.5

Having been closed for a number of years and looking unlikely to ever re-open as a pub, it has managed to buck the current trend of pub closures and having had an extensive refurbishment as well as concerted campaign to get it re-open, and it was good to see it very busy on a recent Sunday mid-afternoon visit, although the downside of that was that it did seem quite noisy. That was probably mostly to do with a group of guys in one corner though, who were unable to converse at a normal volume and could only shout at each other. Kids seem to be well catered for with children’s dishes on the menu, high chairs and even colouring kits available on request. The pub faces on to the river, although there is no riverside frontage, but there are a few picnic benches on two sides. Inside, the main room downstairs has a mixture of carpet and wood laminate flooring and is mostly painted in neutral shades with some contrasting deep aqua paintwork, and perhaps in a nod to it’s nautical location, a couple of internal windows were fashioned to look like ship’s port holes. The room was perhaps lacking a little in any character I thought, with only a couple of old black and white photographs of the locale and an old clock on the otherwise plain walls. Seating was a mixture of tables and chairs and high tables and stools. There was also further seating upstairs on a mezzanine level and a landing. Food wise, the menu offered a decent looking selection of pub grub dishes, with options including a burger, ham egg & chips, scampi and chips and a range of pies. These were mostly priced in the £8 - £10 range. Presentation was perhaps on the trendy side, and we saw some Sunday roasts coming out with the beef sat on some Jenga style potato pieces, and this in turn topped with a Yorkshire pudding whilst the vegetables were served in separate miniature silver buckets. Somewhat unusually for a pub not owned by bath Ales, theirs were the only beers on tap with a choice of Spa, Gem and Barnsey whilst the Beerd Monterey (a Bath Ales offshoot) appeared to have run out. Ciders were Thatcher’s Gold and Thatcher’s Dry.