Pubs and Bars / Pub of the Week
Pub of the week: The Farm
There aren’t too many pub gardens in Bristol where the loudest sound is the rustling of the leaves in the wind, but The Farm is no ordinary place. Held captive in a cul-de-sac just spitting distance from the goats and sheep grazing in the paddocks at St Werburgh’s City Farm, the pub is surrounded by trees and fruitful allotments on three sides and has a country friendliness accompanied by a urban grunginess that is genuine and comfortable, like a favourite pair of shoes.
Passing beneath the swinging wooden sign at the front gate, depicting a lamb inside a pig inside a cow (and hinting at the delicious Sunday roasts on offer for which the pub has become rightly well-known), the garden is full of young drinkers at wooden benches, abandoned kids’ toys, happy dogs and a giant rock painted by Sweet Toof. It’s immediately fun and welcoming, even before pushing open the carved wooden doors of the graffitied front and entering the warm interior with its exhibition of local art and open fire that regularly roars.
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At the big wooden bar beneath chalkboards proclaiming that excellent, hangover-curing Sunday roast, bottles of spirits sit at the back with a big coffee machine, fresh cakes rest on the bar, and the range of beer and cider on tap spans American Lagunitas IPA, Addlestones Cloudy, Bristol Beer Factory’s 12 Apostles, malty Kirin Ichiban and Hop Back Brewery’s Summer Lightning. The barman chats with an old regular as he fills a foaming pint, reminiscing about the old ritual of changing the taps, rolling in 36-gallon barrels and cleaning the pumps once a week.
Where the outside space of other pubs is a forlorn scrap of concrete full of dog ends, here the garden is the main feature, and even early on a Tuesday evening the benches are filled. Two friends chat while rolling cigarettes and sipping sparkling pints. “My friend’s daughter is called Perry Rose,” one of them says to the other. “The first thing I said when he told me is ‘it sounds like a cider!’”
Three girls coo over a happy Staffordshire Bull Terrier as they enter the pub to get a top-up and cheeky sparrows chirp and hop over the crumbs they’ve left behind before diving full-pelt into the hedge behind. A pigeon flies down from the crowns of the tall chimney pots, wings flapping past graffitied magpies and bird boxes. Nature has receded into smaller and smaller islands in Bristol’s urban jungle, but man and beast can happily live – and drink – side-by-side at The Farm.
The Farm, Hopetoun Road, St Werburgh’s, BS2 9YL
0117 944 2384
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