The Glasshouse (JD Wetherspoon), Norwich

A large multi room spoons over two floors, it appears to been at least two buildings knocked together as it’s a bit of a warren. This results in there being three serving counters on the ground floor with the leftmost room and its counter having an L shape and the other rooms being straight and narrow running back from the street. The two sets of five pulls are found on the outer end counters, T-bars are spread about. You may think low ceilings and multiple rooms would give the place at least character and hopefully charm, you would be wrong. It’s a work a day spoons downstairs, no worse than many, better than some. Less decor and more machines than usual I thought, the stairwell or open part between the floors is dominated by large murals. Upstairs is more open and better for it, there appear to be original timbers in one part. Spoons seem to have lavished some money here but I think downstairs fails. To be more positive the staff were very much on the ball on a busy Friday night.

The entrance of the Glasshouse opens onto a seating area with high tables and a beer shelf that is faced by the right-hand side of the bar counter that runs along the rear wall. To the right is a thin strip of standard seating along the right-hand wall and to the left is a split-level seating area with more high tables that are faced by the mid-section of the bar counter. The bar counter then wraps around to the left rear where it faces more seating up the left-hand side of the pub where access can be gained to a split level patio area. There is more seating on the first floor that overlooks the bar area. A thin balcony runs along the left side of the building overlooking the aforementioned patio. The pub is carpeted throughout and laminate runs around the counter. Standard and premium keg was available alongside the two banks of five hand pumps. These were drawing Sharp’s Doom Bar, Greene King IPA and Abbot, Oakham’s JHB, Woodforde’s Nelson and Green Jack Brewing’s Mahseer IPA that comes in at a whopping 5.8% My visit was around dinner time on a recent Thursday so I decided to have a pint and a burger which cost just over £9. Very cheap, but the food wasn’t great. The service was polite and I thought this was a reasonable Spoons.

This is a rambling Spoons on two levels though I didn't look upstairs. It's a roughly L shaped room split into different areas. Sadly the far area was taken up with showing a football match and to make matters worse two of the Locale beers on were football commemorative ones and doubled up along with the Abbot. The seven beers from the ten hand pumps were Doom Bore, Abbot, Oldershaw's Ultimate Goal, Mauldon Three Lions, Wolf Norfolk Pride, St Peter's Two Decades and Moorhouse's White Mist. I went for the Two Decades (£2.59) which was in good nick. It's not a bad Spoons but not an outstanding one.