The Top 44 Places to Drink Near Grey's

Castle Combe has been called the prettiest village in England so many times the locals have stopped blushing, and the Castle Inn sits at its heart looking entirely complicit. It's a proper pub and gastropub with rooms, where the kitchen keeps things rooted in the landscape, Cotswold cider finding its way into the pork, local crab onto the brunch menu. Stone walls, a wood fire, and a bybrook outside doing its photogenic best.

1. Top 50 Gastropubs 2026 · #53 · Top 50 Gastropubs
2. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Tucked into Lilliput Court, this cocktail bar occupies a building that locals will tell you was bricked up and forgotten for years, historically used by thieves and smugglers who found Bath's Georgian law enforcement inconvenient. The outlaw theme runs through the menu, with cocktails named for famous criminals. An extensive whisky selection sits alongside, for when you'd rather just drink like a reprobate without the narrative. Ranked 13th on Top 50 Cocktail Bars 2026.

1. The Pinnacle Guide 1 Pin
2. Top 50 Cocktail Bars 2026 · #13 · Top 50 Cocktail Bars

A vine-covered terrace looks out over Slad Valley, and Laurie Lee, who made this Cotswolds pub famous in "Cider with Rosie," is buried just up the road. The kitchen runs a short, seasonal menu driven by what's growing nearby, with a bar snacks list that takes sardines on toast more seriously than most restaurants take their mains. It ranked fourth on the Top 50 Gastropubs list in 2026.

1. Top 50 Gastropubs 2026 · #4 · Top 50 Gastropubs

The courtyard is the whole argument: a stage, original artwork, beach huts, and covered heated seating squeezed into a pub garden between Bristol and Bath. The licensee came up as a musician and built the programming around it, so live music runs through the calendar rather than landing as a Friday afterthought. A community local that won Best Pub for Entertainment at the Great British Pub Awards, which tells you what the priorities are.

1. Great British Pub Awards 2025 · Best Pub for Entertainment · Great British Pub Awards

A handsome Bath stone gastropub set opposite a medieval church in a quiet Wiltshire village, where the kitchen runs its own smokehouse, bakes its own bread, and churns its own butter and ice cream. You can stop in for a pint and a scotch egg or sit down to a full seasonal menu that swings between dressed scallops and proper sausage and mash without any apparent anxiety about the contradiction.

1. Top 50 Gastropubs 2026 · #63 · Top 50 Gastropubs
2. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Four floors of a handsome old Bristol building given over entirely to cocktails, which feels like the right call. The Milk Thistle is a cocktail bar spread across a hidden vault, a lounge, and an attic, with the kind of eclectic decor that earns the word without apology. Drinks lean classic with house riffs woven in, and the team tends toward recommendations rather than leaving you to flounder. It ranks in the Top 50 Cocktail Bars list.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide
2. The Pinnacle Guide 1 Pin
3. Top 50 Cocktail Bars 2026 · #41 · Top 50 Cocktail Bars

A log fire, a pint of Arkell's, and a menu that treats a Sunday roast with the same seriousness as the à la carte: this Cotswolds village pub pulls off the gastropub balancing act without seeming to try. The team behind it brings serious fine-dining experience to a room that still feels like a local, which is harder than it sounds. British seasonal cooking, sourced close to home, changes often enough to give regulars a reason to keep coming back.

1. Top 50 Gastropubs 2026 · #54 · Top 50 Gastropubs

Graffiti-style caricatures mark the black exterior on Cheltenham Road, and inside, moody lighting and leather stools across two rooms make this cocktail bar feel like a neighbourhood spot that takes its drinks more seriously than its name suggests. The menu leans into an Asian-inflected playfulness, with the Scotch and Champagne, a Chinese classic dressed up with single malt and Moët, a good place to start. It placed 29th on the Top 50 Cocktail Bars 2026 list.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide
2. Top 50 Cocktail Bars 2026 · #29 · Top 50 Cocktail Bars

A cocktail bar on the 52nd floor of the Shard, Gŏng has the views you'd expect and, rarer than it sounds at this altitude, cocktails that could hold their own at ground level too. The name comes from "dougong," the interlocking wooden brackets of traditional Chinese architecture, which you can spot supporting the shelves behind the bar. Shangri-La service, an infinity pool next door, and a horizon that covers most of southern England.

1. Difford's Guide 5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. The Pinnacle Guide 1 Pin

A wood-fired oven does a lot of the heavy lifting at this Cotswolds gastropub, turning out everything from flatbreads to pizza alongside a hearty, classic British menu that changes with the seasons. The kitchen leans on local game dealers, farmers, and fishmongers, so venison faggots sit comfortably next to chicken Milanese. It's the kind of pub where nobody's pretending the food is incidental, and the drinks list makes sure the evening doesn't end too soon.

1. Top 50 Gastropubs 2026 · #20 · Top 50 Gastropubs
2. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

You enter through a red phone box at the mouth of Clifton Down station, which tells you most of what you need to know. Inside, the British theme runs all the way down, cozy sofas for groups, limited bar stools, and a pocket-sized menu small enough to pocket as a souvenir. The small team runs it like a living room they're genuinely attached to, and the bar shows it. A cocktail bar with a spy name and a neighborhood heart.

1. Difford's Guide 5 stars · Difford's Guide

An antler chandelier greets you at the door of this two-floor cocktail bar on Cotham Hill, which runs bigger than its frontage suggests. The Scandinavian-leaning fit-out keeps things clean and calm, with booth seating that nudges the room toward intimate rather than cavernous. The team leans into service in a way that feels deliberate rather than performative, which on a Bristol hill is rarer than it should be.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

A graffiti-scrawled doorway, a seedy pay phone, a luminous red light, and then you're in. The neon sex sign above the stairs does a good job setting expectations that the bar itself immediately subverts: downstairs is calm, clean, and quietly serious about cocktails. It's a speakeasy in the Bristol tradition of making you work a little before rewarding you, and the theatrical entry is genuinely half the fun.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

An old Cotswold coaching inn where the kitchen, built around a wood-fired grill and rotisserie, is literally the room, with a chef's counter facing the embers. The menu runs on sharing plates and leans heavily on beef aged from named farms, cooked over open fire. Sunday lunch draws regulars from the surrounding villages, and Jay Rayner called the deceptively simple menu "a class act." It landed on the Top 50 Gastropubs list for 2026.

1. Top 50 Gastropubs 2026 · #87 · Top 50 Gastropubs

The bar at this Cotswold gastropub was built from reclaimed church panels, which tells you something about the seriousness of the refurbishment. Flagstone floors, lime plaster walls, and heavily beamed ceilings survived intact, and tankards of Black Velvet now get poured from a 1920s pewter oyster bar. The menu runs from prawn cocktail to something more considered, with a daily blackboard filling the gaps. Sunday roasts, with a few quiet twists, draw a crowd that plans ahead.

1. Top 50 Gastropubs 2026 · #44 · Top 50 Gastropubs

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

Loose Cannon is a cocktail bar on Bristol's harbourside where local artists rotate work on the walls and the menu reads like a fever dream, pop-culture riffs on everything from Donkey Kong to Brexit. The drinks are inventive and aggressively garnished, the kind of place where your cocktail arrives wearing something. Students fill it most nights, and the energy leans young and loud in the best harbourside-dive-bar way.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

Pink flamingos and tropical foliage set the tone at this Bristol outpost of the London Cocktail Club, a high-energy cocktail bar that leans hard into a Peter Pan's Neverland theme and doesn't apologize for any of it. The vibe is unapologetically loud and playful, the kind of place where the décor alone commits harder than most people do on a Saturday night. Walk-ins welcome, which tells you all you need to know about the crowd.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide

A Cotswolds inn that pulls its produce straight from Daylesford's farm next door, so the bread, cheese, meat, and vegetables have had almost no time to reconsider their life choices before reaching the table. The Wild Rabbit is a gastropub with a log fire, worn leather armchairs, and an open kitchen, and it sits in the Top 50 Gastropubs list. The bar runs artisan ales alongside the kind of lagers nobody is embarrassed to order.

1. Top 50 Gastropubs 2026 · Sustainable Pub of the Year · Top 50 Gastropubs
2. Top 50 Gastropubs 2026 · #45 · Top 50 Gastropubs
3. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Margot Henderson of Rochelle Canteen brought her London following to a 17th-century Somerset pub tucked between the village church and the hall. Beamed ceilings, flagstone floors, and open fires set the scene for a daily-changing menu that leans hard on local produce, the kind of cooking that makes cottage pie feel like a considered choice. Ranked 14th on the Top 50 Gastropubs list, it draws visitors who book the five antique-furnished rooms upstairs and stay longer than they planned.

1. Top 50 Gastropubs 2026 · #14 · Top 50 Gastropubs
2. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A Grade II-listed former coaching inn in a Cotswolds village, The Royal Oak is a gastropub that has kept its creaky, traditional soul while adding a proper dining room, snugs, and a kitchen that takes seasonal cooking seriously. The menu drifts from pub classics into more ambitious territory without making a fuss about it. Mariella Frostrup once called it a blueprint for the low-key bolthole, which about covers it.

1. Top 50 Gastropubs 2026 · #84 · Top 50 Gastropubs

Twin open fires and flagged floors set the tone at this old Cotswold inn turned gastropub, where the kitchen cooks over flame and changes the menu as often as the farmers call. The team behind London's The Pelican came home to Charlbury to restore it, and the terse, ingredient-led dishes feel like the point rather than the ambition. It ranks in the Top 50 Gastropubs and is in the Michelin Guide. Rooms upstairs if you miss the last train.

1. Great British Pub Awards 2025 · Best Pub for Food · Great British Pub Awards
2. Top 50 Gastropubs 2026 · #28 · Top 50 Gastropubs
3. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A gastropub in the Gwent countryside where the menu changes every week, following whatever's coming in from local farms and suppliers. Josh and Hannah Byrne run the room while the kitchen turns out seasonal plates that lean into the landscape around them. The wine list favors small European producers working sustainably, which sounds earnest until you taste it. Good spot to land after a walk along the Usk.

1. Top 50 Gastropubs 2026 · #46 · Top 50 Gastropubs
2. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

Pewter mugs hang from low beams in this National Trust-owned country pub that has been a fixture of Bretforton village life for centuries. Flagstone floors, roaring fires, and an orchard garden set the scene for real ale, food, and the occasional Morris dancing display. The Great British Pub Awards named it Best Country Pub in 2025, which will surprise no one who has spent an afternoon here working through a pint while someone's dog sleeps by the fire.

1. Great British Pub Awards 2025 · Best Country Pub · Great British Pub Awards

A Glastonbury pub named after a tarot card, in an old coaching inn where the menu runs on Middle Eastern instinct and Somerset produce. The chef, of Jordanian heritage and French training, spent summers cooking with her grandmother in Jordan before stints at The Palomar and a Michelin-starred spot in Anglesey shaped her into someone who can make a shish barak feel completely at home in the West Country. The Michelin Guide awards it a Bib Gourmand.

1. Top 50 Gastropubs 2026 · Chef of the Year · Top 50 Gastropubs · Ayesha Kalaji
2. Top 50 Gastropubs 2026 · #42 · Top 50 Gastropubs
3. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

A 17th-century stone inn near Blenheim Palace that the owners rescued from dereliction and turned into one of the country's more serious gastropubs. The kitchen bakes its own bread, butchers its own meat, and leans hard on organic sourcing. A bar menu, set lunch, Sunday roast, and tasting menu mean you can pitch your visit anywhere from a quiet pint to a proper occasion. Eight rooms upstairs if you'd rather not drive back to Oxford.

1. Top 50 Gastropubs 2026 · #37 · Top 50 Gastropubs
2. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

The cocktails here come with QR codes explaining the science behind them, which sounds gimmicky until you're reading about rooftop honey and sea-salt chocolate fish scales at midnight. Lab 22 is a Cardiff cocktail bar that takes a genuinely theatrical approach to the glass, with bartenders who have been known to breathe fire in service of a drink. Ranked in the Top 50 Cocktail Bars, with Bar Team of the Year 2026 to its name.

1. Top 50 Cocktail Bars 2026 · Bar Team of the Year · Top 50 Cocktail Bars
2. The Pinnacle Guide 1 Pin
3. Top 50 Cocktail Bars 2026 · #24 · Top 50 Cocktail Bars

The seasonal menu at this cocktail bar inside Cardiff's Duke Street Arcade is organized by decade, so you can sip something from the era of your choosing while pretending your taste was always this refined. Tucked just off the castle, Lowkey keeps the music low enough for conversation and runs on table service, which sets the tone. It landed on the Top 50 Cocktail Bars list for 2026, and the classics are there if the concept doesn't grab you.

1. The Pinnacle Guide 1 Pin
2. Top 50 Cocktail Bars 2026 · #47 · Top 50 Cocktail Bars

A cocktail bar spread across three retro-styled levels in Jericho, Raoul's crams Oxford's largest spirits selection into alcoves behind a surprisingly small bar. Rum is the obsession, including a house blend aged in a Madeira cask, though bourbon runs a close second. The fruit-forward cocktails go through more produce than most grocers shift in a week, and the room has the easy, happy hum of a place that's been doing this for a long time.

1. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide

Rough-hewn planks on the walls and upturned casks for seating set the tone at this pared-down wine bar in Jericho, sitting opposite the rather more famous Raoul's. The list is short and deliberate, with everything available by the glass and tasting notes that actually say something useful. Nothing here is trying to impress you, which, in Oxford, is quietly impressive. Local art fills the gaps on the walls that the wood doesn't.

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide

A cocktail bar inside Oxford's grand Macdonald Randolph Hotel, where the wood-panelled walls are lined with photographs of the late actor who played Inspector Morse, the TV detective whose cases were partly filmed here. The show has been off air for decades, which gives the shrine-like décor a pleasantly eccentric quality. Fortunately, the arched ceiling, ornate cornices, and stone fireplace make it a handsome room to drink in regardless.

1. Difford's Guide 4 stars · Difford's Guide

The name sounds like a pub, but the Duke of Cambridge is a cocktail bar, and a proudly self-proclaimed long-standing one at that. A long wooden bar runs one wall, circular booths line the other, and the wide-open floor between them exists for a reason: this place fills up. Happy hour runs four nights a week for four hours, which tells you more about the vibe than any descriptor could.

1. Difford's Guide 2.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 3 stars · Difford's Guide

Named after the grass squares at the centre of Oxford's college quads, this hotel bar sits on the High Street with arched windows, exposed brick, and a central island bar that draws a steady crowd from opening time onward. It has the loose, lively feel of a brasserie rather than a quiet hotel lounge. A courtyard out back turns it into a genuinely pleasant spot when the weather cooperates, which in Oxford is, statistically, an optimistic bet.

1. Difford's Guide 2.5 stars · Difford's Guide

Bentwood chairs, potted palms, and a mosaic-fronted brass bar give this coffee house the air of a Victorian parlour that somehow survived several centuries of undergraduates. Samuel Pepys apparently traced it back to 1650, which makes it older than most of Oxford's excuses. Afternoon tea draws the tourists and the occasional American president; regulars come for coffee and the pleasing sensation of drinking it somewhere that has been around essentially forever.

1. Difford's Guide 3 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide

The oval wooden bar at the center of the room is what orients you first, then the checkerboard tiles, the palms, the terracotta pots, and the tea lights doing their gentle work. This Cowley Road bar runs coffee by day and cocktails by night, with around fifteen classics plus house originals on the menu. The crowd skews local and unhurried, the kind who know the difference between an aperitif and a digestif and order both.

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide

Kazbar is a Moroccan-themed bar on Cowley Road where the staff dress like they wandered off a film set and the seating is all low tables piled with cushions and carpets. The L-shaped wooden bar anchors the room, surrounded by wrought iron, orange trees, and sandy walls that commit to the bit without tipping into theme-park territory. The drinks list skews Spanish more than Moroccan, which is either a surprise or a relief depending on your expectations.

1. Difford's Guide 3 stars · Difford's Guide

The cocktail bar at Malmaison Oxford is set inside a former Victorian prison, and the original cell bars are still on the windows. The main bar sits on the third floor in what used to be the visitors room, high-ceilinged and dressed in the plush fabrics and dark furniture the Malmaison group does reliably well. It's the kind of place where the surroundings do most of the talking, which is fine, because the surroundings are a jail.

1. Difford's Guide 2 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Difford's Guide Difford's Guide