The Pump House, Swansea

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Pub SignMan left this review about The Pump House

This is a large Brains pub in a converted pump house next to the lock gates for the Tawe Basin. The pub is accessed through an arched porch, leading into a wide bar area with a very utilitarian feel to it. The room has a lot of bare floorboards, steel walls and railings, exposed brick pillars and walls, old dark wood beams and lots of visible ceiling ducts, pipework, cable trays and the like. A huge servery, split into two parts across two different levels, runs down one side of the room and has a metal counter top and a while shelf bar back with wire mesh backing. Seating is mixed, with high stools, standard chairs and a few tub chairs filling the majority of the space. One wall has a selection of words from an English-Welsh dictionary printed on it for no apparent reason, but otherwise décor is kept to a bare minimum and visual distraction is in short supply. The pub is quite shallow but extremely wide, with the left hand end split over a number of different levels and looking perhaps a bit more like a restaurant space than the rest of the room. Meanwhile, to the right there is what might almost be classified as a separate room - a darker, wood panelled space with a few pictures on the walls and a bit of a lounge feel, making it the most pub-like part of the whole building. Some TV screens throughout were showing muted rolling news coverage and there was some music playing very quietly in the background somewhere. A few seats are available outdoors, some overlooking the aforementioned lock, which could make this a pleasant and popular spot in warmer months, but the place was all but deserted on my Saturday evening visit, contrasting notably with the packed Queen's Hotel, just down the road.
Just two Brains ales were available, which might go some way to explain the lack of enthusiasm from the locals - SA and Rev James - and my pint of SA was only just drinkable, which might also help explain the absence of customers. A final hand pump was unclipped and there was a fairly standard keg selection which surprisingly didn't seem to contain any Brains beers.
I had no idea what to expect from this place, but I have to say I left feeling very disappointed. The pub felt like it was perhaps more set up for family groups wanting to visit for food in the daytime and that evening trade was not a speciality. It's nice that an old building has been opened to the public with a new use, but in all honesty, the building is just a shell and imparts no sense of history or of its former use. A big let down all told and future trips to the Maritime Quarter will see me give this place the swerve.

On 16^th January 2016 - rating: 4
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