The Bear Inn, Oxford

The Bear Inn is down Alfred Street in Oxford and since I had a half hour to kill before the bus I traipsed down there.  It is really old and you kind of step down into it and even then the ceiling is low enough to make you sort of stoop a little.  There used to be a bear pit, but that might have been at the previous (13th century) location and not the current (16th century) one.

It was full of upper middle class academic types, which makes sense since it is right in the old cloistered part of the University of Oxford, but a very comfortable place indeed and in spite of the stilted atmosphere.  On the way in there I passed bums dressed better than me so when I popped in still seaty and slightly beer scented from an errant down-down earlier in the evening I didn’t feel like I immediately fit in with the sport jacket and tie crowd in there, but halfway through my pint of George Gale Festival Mild (a near perfect mild, I might add, chocolately but still bitter, only available in May) I realised they were all quite piss drunk indeed.

This is close enough to work that I think I might suggest it for a Friday afterwork tipple. A small but quiet place, I’m sure the crowd will spill out into the narrow streets closer to the end of a workday.