Pub of the Week: The Bag of Nails, Hotwells

The picture round at Tuesday night’s pub quiz at the Bag of Nails was newspapers – snippets of mastheads from tomorrow’s fish and chip paper from around the world.

“I’ll see how many of those I’m in today,” landlord Luke Daniels shouts from behind the bar.

It’s no idle boast.

In the last fortnight, this unassuming Hotwells pub with its board games and Lego sessions has appeared in most of the UK tabloids and broadsheets, and further afield on websites such as Mashable where the story, ‘This is what the inside of a British cat pub looks like’, has at the last count been shared more than 33,000 times.

It has even been featured – unfairly perhaps – in the hugely popular Get in the Sea Twitter account:

GET IN THE FUCKING SEA, CAT PUB. pic.twitter.com/c4NiaDV9We

— Get In The Sea (@getinthesea) November 12, 2015

I usually pop in to the Bag of Nails every Tuesday evening before my weekly trip to Chai Shai a few doors up, choosing a half to drink while waiting for my tiffin to be filled in Bristol’s best Indian restaurant. The most recent choice was a well-kept Grifter by Lawrence Hill’s Arbor Ales.

On a visit the following afternoon, a couple were playing Connect Four in the window seat overlooking the roundabout at the bottom of Jacob’s Wells Road and Franz Ferdinand’s eponymous debut album had just been put on the record player.

The media continue to flock here. This time it was a man from the BBC News website who walked through the door soon before Luke arrived on his bicycle.

And then she appeared – one of the stars of the show, jumping up on top of the bar in front of a sign advertising “hand raised pork pies” for £2 as the man from Auntie was interviewing a couple of students who had wandered in after reading about this fabled cat pub on the internet.

Underneath my feet another feline nonchalantly wandered by. Most mornings when I pass this pub on the way to take my eldest daughter to school, we see at least one asleep in a cardboard tray.

“A lot of people come in here now expecting to be passed kittens over the bar,” the barman tells another couple with a palpable look of disappointment that there were no cars on show any longer.

“The internet has skewed it,” he continues. “It’s not an uncommon thing. Half of the pubs in Bristol have cats. It’s just that we had 10 kittens.”

It was still the afternoon so I chose a half pint of Love of Work, brewed with Earl Grey tea by Siren Craft Brew of Berkshire.

There are always six cask ales here, with pump clips of beers in the cellar (glimpsed through circular windows in the floor lit by flashing lights) attached to one small mirror behind the bar, and pump clips of beers on sale next displayed on another mirror the other side of the till.

Above these mirrors is a shelf on which all of the bottled beer available is precariously balanced, near a printed piece of A4 paper with the words, ‘No Stupid Hats Please! No Ludicrous Xmas Jumpers.’

The rules in this pub are almost as well-known as its cats, 21 of them now chalked up on a pillar.

They include:

#1 No cunts
#6 Sad pedantry is encouraged
#13 No snogging, judo or Stairway to Heaven 

There is a flash of camera phones when a couple of cats reappear downstairs after a much-deserved afternoon tea.

For now, for this fortnight at least, these cats are responsible for making their home the most famous pub in the UK.

The Bag of Nails, 141 St George’s Road, Hotwells, Bristol, BS1 5UW