The Abbey, Gloucester

This modern student-friendly bar was formed when two pubs, The Kings Arms and The Tabard, were knocked through, creating a large street corner pub in the heart of the city centre. Previously known as Cleopatra's and Varsity, the pub underwent a major refurbishment in 2012, before opening in its current guise. You enter to a carpeted front seating area with lots of standard tables and chairs, modern wallpaper and a few partitioning screens. Sadly, everything has been painted a dull shade of grey, which does the space no favours and makes the raised seating area which runs under the right hand windows a much more attractive proposition. Here you can find some nice padded, low back bench seating, arranged into open booths, each with a decorative lampshade hanging from above. Moving further into the pub, you eventually reach the bar area, with the servery on the left displaying a modern bar back with some fairly pleasant back-lit glass for decoration. Beyond is a large, open rear section, screened from the rest of the pub by a few structural pillars and presumably this was once the dividing line between the two former pubs. You can find some high table and stool seating back here, but it seemed a bit gloomy to me and not as inviting as the front half of the pub. TV screens were showing rugby and football simultaneously, but once the matches had finished, this was replaced by loud music. We stopped in here for a bite to eat and found the menu was nice and cheap but the quality wasn't really up to much. The staff seemed a bit disinterested and tables were generally pretty dirty. There were six hand pumps on the bar offering Sharps Doom Bar, Greene King IPA, Courage Best and Wells Bombardier, with two pumps unclipped. My pint of Doom Bar was pretty poor and my other half had a glass of wine that was undrinkable. This pub doesn't really seem to be making much of an effort, content to attract students, passers by and other non discerning pub goers. I was pretty disappointed with the food, drink and service here which overshadowed some of the pub's more promising aspects. There are lots of good pubs in Gloucester, so this one will remain well down the pecking order.