The New Inn, Sutton

This is a smart, deceptively spacious back street boozer with a pleasantly surprising traditional interior. You enter through the front door to a carpeted main bar with the servery on the right hand wall and some nice booths, separated from one another by old front doors and filled with bench and standard seating. A bare brick wall next to the entrance has a fireplace on it, which seems like an unusual location and suggests that the entrance used to be elsewhere. Walls throughout are half panelled with some bare brickwork above in places, creating a quite appealing aesthetic. The servery looks fairly modern and has been decorated with a foreign bank note collection. A few tables can be found in the front bay window, with others dotted throughout the room, before the pub narrows past the bar, extending a long way back in a space that is probably just a little too wide to be deemed a corridor. There’s a dartboard in this area and shelves lined with numerous trophies, whilst the walls have been decorated with nice home made photo montages of various pub social events. Several screens were showing a Premier League football fixture, but as Chelsea weren’t playing, no-one seemed to be paying it much attention. Loud music played throughout my stay, mostly from a juke box positioned opposite the bar. There is a large garden to the rear which I didn’t explore on this visit. There are four handpulls on the bar, but three were unclipped and the fourth had a Doom Bar clip reversed, which was pretty disappointing. Otherwise, it was standard keg options, including John Smiths Smooth and Guinness Extra Cold, which I tried and found to be extra cold. There’s a pretty good pub here somewhere, but it seems that the locals aren’t fussed about a lack of decent beer and will happily put up with the various distractions the pub offers. Worth a quick visit in passing if there is something on the pumps, but sadly this falls some way short of its potential.

There were four handpumps on the bar – three had clips reversed, and the fourth was unclipped. The barmaid was apologetic that they didn’t have any real ale on, from which I suppose that they normally do have it on, but it smacks of lax cellar management to run out of everything. Perhaps they had a busy Saturday night. I didn’t see any signs of food, or menus on tables, but there was a menu at the end of the bar. The pub itself looks like a house conversion, and if so it must have been many years ago as I doubt whether such a thing would be allowed now. The bar counter is on the right, with a seating/drinking area to the right of it, with more seating at the back. The disadvantage is that with only a handful of people standing round the bar (as was the case during my visit) access to both the bar and the rear of the pub can be blocked. But for all that it’s an attractive and cosy pub. The walls are wood panelled up to the dado rail level, with exposed brickwork above that. There’s an open see through log effect gas fire on the right as you enter, and a large wood-panelled pillar further back. A dartboard is at the back on the right, which I guess ought to be well-used judging by the trophies displayed on a shelf above the playing area. The negatives for me were the lack of real ale, and a strong smell of disinfectant or toilet cleaner was very evident where I was sitting, which admittedly was not far from the Gents. Nevertheless, I would give it another chance to see if these negatives really were a one-off.