The Best Pubs in Coventry

The Old Windmill at 22-23 Spon Street is the one most people name first, and with good reason. CAMRA has it as a sixteenth century building, it is listed Grade II, and its interior carries CAMRA's two star rating for very special national historic interest, which only a few hundred pubs in the country hold. It has never been knocked through into a single room. You come in along a long flagged and panelled corridor, and off it are three small interconnected rooms: one with a copper topped counter, one with ancient panelling, old leaded windows and a black brick open fire set above patterned floor tiles, and one with a large ornate fireplace. The covered yard at the back was the brewery outbuilding.

What is on is Theakston Old Peculier, Timothy Taylor Landlord and Draught Bass as the regulars, with changing guests that have recently included Church End and Silhill's Windmill IPA, brewed for the pub and named after it. It took Best Community Pub and Stonegate Pub of the Year in 2025, and it has been local CAMRA Pub of the Year twice and Cider Pub of the Year once. Two beer festivals a year, live music on the middle Fridays of the month, folk on Sunday afternoons and bluegrass once a month. The food stops at pork pies and cheese platters, which is the right call for a pub this shape. Dogs are welcome, there is a real fire, and the small garden at the back is weekends only.

The Golden Cross stands on the corner of Hay Lane and Pepper Lane, in the cobbled streets between the old cathedral ruins and the new one. It dates from 1583 and is listed Grade II star, a grade only three buildings in the city centre hold. It was first recorded as an inn in 1661, when Coventry had 137 inns and alehouses; almost none of the others are left. The thing to look up at is the dragon beam in the ground floor ceiling, the timber that lets the jettied first floor turn the corner of the building. A restoration around the turn of the twentieth century used timbers taken from the original wooden bell tower of St Michael's, the church whose ruins are now the old cathedral. The 1968 extension roughly doubled the building, so the lounge downstairs is the older and the better room. Upstairs turns into more formal dining from Friday to Sunday.

Two Coventry pubs get mixed up in almost every list of this kind, so it is worth separating them.

The Gatehouse Tavern is at 44-46 Hill Street, CV1 4AN, near the Belgrade Theatre and a couple of minutes from Spon Street. It is not medieval. The landlord rebuilt it from the shell of the former Leigh Mills gatehouse, which is where the name comes from. What it has is beer: up to seven real ales at a time, with Brew XI and Draught Bass as the regulars and four changing, and it has held its Good Beer Guide entry for a very long run. It has the largest garden of any pub in the city centre, stained glass windows depicting the rugby Six Nations, and it is where the Coventry City London Supporters Club meets before a game. Note that it is closed on Mondays: noon to 11 Tuesday to Saturday, noon to 10 on Sunday.

The genuinely fourteenth century building is the Whitefriars Olde Ale House at 114-115 Gosford Street, CV1 5DL, which really was part of the Whitefriars monastery before it spent years as a butcher's shop. The small front room was the friars' kitchen. Upstairs there is a mural and floors that are noticeably not level. Check before you make a trip: cask ale has not been available there recently and its trading has been intermittent, so treat it as a building to look at rather than a pub to rely on.

The Greyhound at Hawkesbury Junction is the pub locals send visitors to. The address is Sutton Stop, CV6 6DF, and Sutton Stop is what everyone actually calls it, after the family who were lock keepers here. It sits where the Coventry and Oxford canals meet, in a spot that was the industrial heart of the region two hundred years ago and is now one of the prettiest places in Warwickshire to sit with a pint.

The building is 1830s and feels it: quirky layout, low ceilings, stone floors and a great deal of canal and local paraphernalia on the walls. It is an Everards pub, which is the same Leicestershire brewery that turns up all over the county next door. The terrace at the front looks straight out over the junction and fills the moment the sun comes out; the larger garden behind has its own outdoor bar in summer. There is a proper freshly cooked menu rather than the token one a lot of canal pubs get away with, and two beer festivals a year. It has won the Godiva award for the best pub in Coventry and Warwickshire four times and taken local CAMRA Pub of the Year four years running. Open 11 to 11 Monday to Saturday, noon to 10.30 on Sunday.

Getting there means a bus or a car, or a walk along the towpath from the city. The walk is the better option if you have the afternoon. It takes about an hour and a half and is flat the whole way, which is the nature of a towpath.

The Broomfield Tavern is the current Coventry CAMRA Pub of the Year and the answer to what the local scene looks like rather than what the guidebooks say about it. It is a Victorian free house at 14-16 Broomfield Place, CV5 6GY, tucked away in Spon End about a minute's walk from the Nick Newbold Stadium, the ground formerly called Butts Park Arena and home to both Coventry Rugby and Coventry United. Eight changing beers, sometimes served from oak casks, and up to eighteen real ciders, which is why it also took local Cider Pub of the Year in 2025. The turnover is quick enough that something new is always coming on. Live music on Friday nights, folk and mountain music on Mondays and Thursdays. The garden takes dogs. Food runs to cheese and pickle batches, which in Coventry means a bread roll and nothing else.

Hops d'Amour at 67 Corporation Street, CV1 1GX, is the pub that held the Pub of the Year title for the four years before the Broomfield took it back, winning it in 2022, 2023 and 2024. It was Coventry's first micropub, it is family owned, and it occupies what used to be the Singers sewing centre. Six cask and four keg lines, changing constantly, with a deliberate bias towards brewers who do not otherwise reach the city. It is a few minutes' walk from the Old Windmill, which makes the two of them an easy pair.

Byatt's brew in the city and are the name to look for on a pump clip. They took both a gold and a silver medal in the Champion Beer of Britain judging in 2025, and their Mahana IPA had already taken silver in the British and New World IPA category. A Coventry pub with Byatt's on is usually a Coventry pub that has thought about its cellar.

Twisted Barrel at FarGo Village brew on site and run the tap house next to the plant. Everything they make and everything they sell is vegan, which they believe makes them the only entirely cruelty free brewery and tap house anywhere. There are 24 draught lines, at least a dozen of them their own, plus guest beers and ciders and a decent alcohol free and gluten free range. They run quiz nights, a homebrew club and brewery tours. The hours are shorter than a pub's, so check before setting off: 5 to 10 on Wednesday and Thursday, noon to midnight Friday and Saturday, noon to 10 on Sunday.

If you are timing a visit around beer rather than buildings, the Coventry Beer Festival ran on 27 and 28 March in 2026, and Warwick University's real ale festival, which reached its 46th edition in February 2026, is the other fixture in the calendar.

The two Wetherspoons, the City Arms in Earlsdon and the Earl of Mercia in the centre, both made the Good Beer Guide in 2021. Not every branch of the chain manages that, and it says something about how seriously the local branch takes cellar quality regardless of who owns the pub. The Earl of Mercia is also the cheapest sit down pint in the city centre by a clear margin, and it is the one that will find six of you a table at short notice on a Friday.

The other one to watch is the Nursery Tavern on Lord Street, which Black Country Ales bought from Stonegate in December 2025. Black Country run their pubs on a large permanent range of their own beers plus a rotating guest list, so a pub changing hands that way usually means the beer range is about to get considerably longer.

Any list of Coventry pubs written more than a year ago will send you to the Town Wall Tavern on Bond Street, tucked in behind the Belgrade Theatre. Do not go looking for it. It closed for good on Sunday 26 July 2026.

It is worth saying what went, because it explains the shape of the rest of this list. The Town Wall dated to around 1816, stood on the line of the old city wall and was the actors' pub, full at the interval and after the curtain. Its front snug, the Donkey Box, measured 7ft 8in by 5ft 5in and was reputedly among the smallest rooms in any pub in the country; the name comes from a donkey in a Belgrade pantomime that was walked in to see whether it would fit. It closed once in August 2024, reopened on 28 February 2025 under a new licensee, and could not make the numbers work a second time against a rent reported at around £35,000 a year.

That is the pressure every pub on this page is under, and it is the argument for spending money in the ones that are still open rather than only reading about them.

Start at the Old Windmill on Spon Street in the early afternoon, when it is quiet enough to look at the building properly rather than through a crowd. Walk down to the Golden Cross by way of the cathedral ruins, which takes about ten minutes and is the best ten minutes of walking in the city. From there Hops d'Amour on Corporation Street is a few minutes for something you will not have had before, and the Earl of Mercia is about the same if you want a cheap pint and a chair.

If beer is the point rather than buildings, leave the centre after the Old Windmill and go out to the Broomfield Tavern in Spon End instead. It is about twenty minutes on foot or a short bus ride, and eight changing beers and eighteen ciders makes for a different afternoon entirely.

With a full day, give it to the canal. Walk the towpath out to the Greyhound at Hawkesbury Junction, eat there, and come back on the bus.

Coventry station is on the West Coast Main Line, about twenty minutes from Birmingham New Street and just over an hour from London Euston, which makes all of this a plausible day out without a car. The city centre is small enough that everything above is walkable from the station apart from the Greyhound and the Broomfield.

Check opening days rather than assuming. The Gatehouse Tavern is shut on Mondays and Twisted Barrel does not open at all until Wednesday afternoon, which catches people out more than anything else on this list.

The ring road is the other thing worth knowing. Its junctions are close together and the slip roads are short, so if you are driving in, pick a car park before you set off rather than working it out at speed. Junction 8 is the one for Hill Street and Spon Street.