Town Wall Tavern, Coventry

Old fashioned multiroom pub with quarry tiled floors, although with stripped back walls. Three pulls in the little front snug with another five in the main public, there’s a bigger side/back room as well. Well balanced range of micro and macro in fair nick. The staff are a wee bit incompetent but they mean well and it's a nice place.

Located in a part of town that has undergone (and is still undergoing) a great deal of redevelopment over the years, the Town Wall Tavern is an attractive two room back street pub and a great survivor to boot. Two separate entrances with etched glass panes denoting 'Bar' and 'Smoke Room' can still be found to the front of the pub. The Bar is in the left hand part of the building and forms a deceptively narrow room with the servery to the front right and seating on each side of the room to the rear. The servery has a very satisfying curved counter and matching canopy with a board on the bar back listing the various ale options. A nice tiled fireplace acts as a centrepiece of sorts for the room which has sturdy banquettes around the perimeter of the rear half along with quite a few comfy low stools. The right hand wall has been covered with a collage of sheet music for various well known hits from the 1960's which is a fairly unusual but surprisingly effective means of decoration, providing plenty of visual distraction along with a good collection of breweriana which fills the rest of the wall space. A door to the rear right leads through to the Smoke Room which has some rather nice carpet throughout and a good selection of bench seating arranged across a series of semi-partitioned nooks that afford you a good bit of privacy and help make this a cosy, peaceful spot for a quiet drink. The decor in here seemed a bit more homely, there was another nice fireplace on the end wall and a decent Saturday night crowd created a very pleasant ambience. There was a good ale range on the bar, albeit mainly from established regional brewers. Options on this occasion were Adnams Southwold Bitter, Robinsons Magnum IPA, Theakston Vanilla Stout and Old Peculiar, Brains Rev James, Draught Bass and Caledonian Deuchars IPA. I tried the Vanilla Stout which was a bit too vanilla-forward for my liking and my Dad tried the Magnum IPA, with both turning out to be in excellent condition. The bar staff were very friendly, stopping to chat to us about their beer and Coventry Beer Festival which was taking place that evening. This is a cracking little pub which had bags of character and two very well appointed and suitably different bars in which to situate yourself. I thought the beer here was top notch and the service up there with the best we encountered in the city. A top notch ale house and arguably the premier destination pub in the city centre nowadays.

Fine old-fashioned pub in an unpromising location between the modern Belgrade Theatre and a cleared building plot. Traditional furniture and decor in two bars, one tiny, the other just small, with a larger (relatively speaking) opened-out lounge to one side. Good selection of real ale, extending from the regular Bass, Old Peculier, Adnams Bitter and Broadside Old Peculier and Deuchars IPA to the guest Robinson's Trooper and Moorhouse's Blonde Witch (£3.40).