The Fox Inn, Chipping Norton

Attractive Cotswold inn, under new management according to a chalkboard out front. Narrow rectangular bar with a modernised but still fairly traditional feel, plus a small lounge beyond and a side room featuring some rather austere dining tables and minimal decor. Also has a few picnic benches by the front door and a rear beer garden with some wooden play equipment and a few old apple trees that currently risk you getting an 'Isaac Newton' if your timing wrong! Hooky (£3.50), London Pride and Butty Bach available from three of five handpumps.

A sturdy-looking pub with a traditional Cotswold stone exterior. The interior has quite modern slant with exposed brick and beams (unsure if these are original though), with a part-wood, part-flagstone floor and a couple of drinking areas, plus a massive dining room to the left down some steps. Narrow padded banquette seating and an ornately carved bar back also feature. Quite how much of this original and how much is well-sourced salvage is hard to determine but you can see what they’re aiming for but it’s maybe a little clinical and not as cosy as I'd like. Not helped by the interior being rather dark, a little more lighting wouldn’t go amiss especially in the lower snug area off to the left. However that’s not to decry the effort clearly being made. There were six ales available (XT6, two Hook Norton beers, White Horse Rustler, TT Landlord Bombardier) at around £3.50 pp. Quality was a little mixed; the XT and Landlord were both very good but the Hooky and Bombardier rather less so. The pub has won its local CAMRA branch pub of the year for 2012 and the guest ale clips above the bar show their commitment to getting in a diverse range. Worth mentioning the cleanliness of the posh toilets, more sparkling than my mum could manage. The eclectic piped music added an interesting bit of atmosphere and made the bloke sat at the bar in a pork pie hat and early 80’s ska get-up look a little less out-of-place in a rural Oxfordshire pub; indeed the clientele mix was far more eclectic than I expected for a pub in this location. Dart board available. According to other reports elsewhere this is an Enterprise pub with a revolving door of licensees, hopefully the current ones will last a bit longer than some of their predecessors! It’s worth popping in to this one, the licensees are clearly trying hard and with a little more consistency on the ale front could really do well.