The Pit & Pendulum, Nottingham

Split-level pub with various different seating areas, all full of gothic nonsense, with doors onto Pelham Street as well as Victoria Street. Surprisingly extensive bar food menu for the daytime, but one suspects the atmosphere changes at sundown... (or, at least, that's what the Eerie Pub Co marketing team would have you believe). Hobgoblin, Banks's Black Diamond and Ey Up from Dancing Duck (£3.20) available from five handpumps.

Official site of The Pit & Pendulum - www.eerie-pubs.co.uk

A pub, with two frontages, that occupies the ground and cellar level of a four storey 17th century styled building, mainly in red brick, with ashlar stone quoins, keystones, pilasters and balustrade roof. The pub interior, as the name suggests, is in the Gothic style conjured-up by an Edgar Allan Poe novel. The upper floor is irregular in shape and is in red and green, with Gothic wood tracery, fake stone work and has old scientific instruments hanging from the ceiling, or are in display cases. The hologram of a horned helmet is a little different. The cellar has a brick vaulted ranges that contain torture equipment - a pillory, manacles, a gibbet cage, for example, as well as the same red and green walls. A big pendulum hangs down between the two floors. It is all fun. The bogs are hidden behind a 'secret' door, to continue the theme. The service was fine and the clientele quite mixed. They do cheap and cheerful food, which was fine and the music was mixed, and at a decent level. The TV had silent news on. Beer; usual tap stuff with Hobgoblin, Jennings Crag Rat and a decent enough Newby Wyke's White Squall on handpull. A fun place to visit and as a historian I would go back for that purpose - other people that may like this pub are:- Goths - as it is a castley kind of interior; emos - as it is dark and gloomy; sadists - sit downstairs and watch the people in need desperate of a pee fail to find the bogs (indeed, send them the wrong way); masochists - wait until you need a pee desperately, then get lost looking for the bogs, when it really hurts - ask (just not the sadist watching!); bondage fetishists - you can get-off on the manacles and pillory; avid Poe readers are taken for granted and finally, real ale fans - well, worth a pop in just to see what's on!