The Farrington Inn, Bristol

The first impression when walking in to this pub is that you’re in the “public bar”. I generally tend towards the lounge bar, but this was not in evidence. There was an adjacent room that may well have been a lounge bar, or more of a restaurant area, but this was clearly not in use on our visit as it was all in darkness. From what little I could glimpse it had exposed stone walls and may well have had more character than the bar that was in use. It’s a large and fairly featureless space with lots of small round tables scattered around. The décor is good condition and looks as though it may well have been recently refurbished with new carpet covering the bulk of the floor and a few tiles around the bar area. There were lots of public bar accruements such as a plasma and dart board on the wall, a pool table, quiz and fruit machines, a juke box and even a couple of sets of disco lights up on the wall. There was a large fireplace with a wood burning stove in it, but unfortunately this was not is use on our visit, even though it had started to snow outside. There was also a leather sofa in one corner, but this looked a little out of place in a decidedly un-cosy room. There were a couple of posters advertising live bands which are presumably a regular feature. Rather oddly, around 50% of the drinks seemed to be off. Two of the three hand pumps had their clips turned round, at least three of the other taps had “out of stock” notices on them, and I was informed that the Blackthorn had sold out when I tried to order that, even though that didn’t have a notice on it. This would be bad enough on a Sunday or a Monday, but at 6:00pm on a Friday evening? The landlady seemed friendly enough, but wasn’t forthcoming when I mentioned this. The solitary beer that was (apparently) in stock was Butcombe, and the ciders were an out of stock Blackthorn as mentioned, plus Thatcher’s Gold.