The 365 pubs, and what’s left of them
The old line was that Norwich had a church for every week of the year and a pub for every day of it. Fifty-two and three hundred and sixty-five. The churches are largely still standing, which is why the skyline looks the way it does. The pubs are another story, and the count has fallen a long way, as it has in every English city.
But the reputation left something behind. Norwich still has a serious concentration of good pubs for a city of its size, a proper local brewing culture, and a beer festival that other cities have copied. I have been to around sixty of them over the years, which is nowhere near all of them, but it is enough to have a decent opinion.
These are the eleven I would actually send you to.
The old ones
The Adam and Eve
The oldest in the city and the one to start with. It sits tucked behind the cathedral in a quiet spot that feels a long way from the centre despite being about four minutes from it.
Two regular cask ales, two rotating guests, usually with Norfolk brewers well represented. The selection is smaller than you’ll find elsewhere, but that is what happens when the bar is the size of a generous cupboard.
Go in summer and sit outside, it is one of the loveliest spots in Norwich to spend a warm evening. Go in winter and take the low ceilings and the pews for what they are. It is snug rather than spacious, and on a busy night you will be close to your neighbours. Nearly eight hundred years of continuous service buys a lot of forgiveness.
The Murderers
I have been drinking here for over ten years and it is still the first place I suggest.
A thing worth knowing before you go looking for it: the registered name over the door is the Gardeners Arms. Nobody calls it that. Ask anyone in Norwich for the Murderers and they will point you to Timberhill without breaking stride.
The range is the best of any pub on this list: five or more lagers, three or four ciders, their own Murderers ale and Edith Cavell as the standing pair, plus four or five rotating. Food as well, and it is decent.
It is the best sport pub in the city by a distance. Screens in every nook, including in the gents, which sounds like a joke until you’re mid-pint during a penalty shootout and grateful for it. Big football, boxing and rugby nights fill it completely. Before Norwich City home games there is a warm, joyful atmosphere as people gather here and then walk down to the ground together.
The name is not a gimmick. There were real murders here, and the pub keeps the history on its walls alongside a lot of its original interior. The publican, Phil Cutter, co-founded the City of Ale festival, which tells you something about where this pub sits in the city’s beer culture.
The one limitation: outdoor seating is a small strip alongside the pub on the hill, so on a hot day you will be indoors, but no fear - full air conditioning is provided throughout.
The Ribs of Beef
A traditional single-bar pub on the river, and calmer than its central location suggests. Four to six rotating ales plus the usual lagers, ciders and wines, light bar snacks, and prices that haven’t got carried away.
What I like about it is the board and card games. It is a pub built for sitting down for a few hours, and the staff are friendly enough that you will want to.
Two honest notes on the outdoor seating. The riverside spot downstairs is genuinely lovely and there is very little of it, so it goes fast. The seating at road level sits on a busy stretch for both cars and pedestrians, and is a lot less pleasant than the photos suggest.
The Golden Triangle
The Black Horse, Earlham Road
The furthest walk on this list and worth every minute of it. Virgin Radio voted it the best pub in the UK and Ireland in 2025, and for once the award tracks.
The building is over three hundred years old and was properly restored in 2015. Inside is beautiful without being precious. Outside is a large garden with a lot of seating, heaters for when it turns, and the kind of relaxed local atmosphere that cannot be designed in.
The food is the draw, often built on local seasonal produce, and the roast has a real reputation. The beer and ale range is strong and the cocktail list is better than a pub of this type has any business having.
It is also the most dog-friendly pub in Norwich. Dogs are welcome in the bar, there are biscuits, and on Sundays they do a free roast for the dog as well. Book if you’re eating, especially on a Sunday.
Temple Bar
The best Sunday roast in Norwich. I will defend that.
Beyond the roast it is a proper all-rounder: pool tables, dartboards, and a genuinely friendly room. It is a good football pub for anyone who finds the city centre too much on a match day, quieter and roomier while still having life in it. Fairy lights in the beer garden, which sounds twee and works.
Up Magdalen Street way
The Artichoke
The best beer knowledge on this list. Five rotating real ales, usually heavy on Norfolk and Suffolk brewers, and twenty-plus choices across beer, lager and cider. The staff know what they are pouring and will pour it properly, which is rarer than it should be.
They run events most months and publish the list on Instagram, so it is worth a look before you go.
The Leopard
Two or three minutes’ walk from the Artichoke, which makes the pair a natural double.
A smaller place with a strong range of real ales and craft beer, clean and more spacious than you expect. This is not a wooden-beams pub, it is a modern local with a good crowd of regulars. There is a small courtyard, but the pub is better inside.
I will be straight about this one. It is not a destination in the way the Black Horse or the Murderers are. It is an excellent stop on a crawl through that side of the city, and that is exactly how I would use it.
By the river
The Red Lion, Bishopgate
Closed for a while, reopened after a serious restoration, and now one of the best places in Norwich to spend a summer evening.
It sits on the Wensum in the shadow of the cathedral. Inside there are real fires, a conservatory, and bar stools with a view of the water. The food is a step above standard pub cooking, and the beer, ale, wine and cider ranges are all strong.
Outside is where it wins. Terraces on both the river and bridge sides, a large teepee with outdoor fires, and free marshmallows to roast. There are kingfishers to spot on that stretch of the river, if you’re patient.
One clarification worth having, because it confuses people. The saunas and cold plunges on the riverbank are run by The Lions’ Den, a separate business working in partnership with the pub and Norfolk Paddle Boards. Wood-fired sauna looking out over the river, cold plunge after, and paddleboarding lessons and hire in the warmer months. You book with them directly rather than at the bar. The pub has a very small car park to the side (for pub customers only - sorry sauna and water lovers!), that is often full, but worth a look. There is no car access across the river, so you would have to come between the courts and cathedral side.
In the middle
The Garnet
On the corner of Norwich market, and the least corporate-feeling pub in the city centre.
There is a small shop attached selling local food, drink and gifts. Brick Pizza next door is excellent and you can eat it at a pub table, and you can do the same with anything you pick up from the market stalls, which is one of the great small pleasures of the city.
Good range of cask beers plus lagers, stouts and spirits, though the selection is not the largest and the bar is small. There is often one person working it, so service slows at busy times. Be patient.
The whole game here is getting an outside table and watching the market. The indoor seating is unremarkable. The good news is that people tend to stop for one or two and move on, so tables turn over more than you’d expect.
The modern two
Neither of these is a pub in the traditional sense. Both are worth your time.
Gonzo’s
The rooftop is the reason to come, and from spring through autumn it is one of the best places to drink in the city. Plenty of seating, two large fire pits with stools around them, heaters above the tables, and its own outside bar with a good beer and cocktail range including things you won’t recognise, but are excited to try.
Downstairs is a separate proposition: an indoor bar with video games on small screens above it, which turns into a proper late spot. I used to come here on weeknights, Tuesdays through Thursdays, and there was always a good atmosphere built mostly from hospitality and retail workers who don’t get a normal weekend. If you want the vibe without the crush, that is when to go.
There is a meat restaurant on the middle floor called Brix & Bones. I haven’t eaten there, so I won’t pretend to have an opinion, but it is always busy and the reports are very good.
The Wildman
Music all day, closer to a soul train than a pub playlist, and it stays on even when the live sport is showing. That tells you what kind of place it is.
The cocktails are the point. The bar staff are genuinely expert, and between 4pm and 8pm every day it is two for £15 across the whole cocktail list. There is a solid range of lagers, wines and spirits too.
The crowd runs from late twenties to fifties, so it is not a student room, and the interior has been thought about properly. Two honest drawbacks: there is no outdoor space at all, and it gets very busy on Friday evenings, Saturdays and some Sunday afternoons. I still love it. The atmosphere is as reliable as anywhere in Norwich.
The one I would skip
The Compleat Angler. It sits right by the bridge opposite the train station, which is the only real argument for it.
It has the feel of a standard blueprint Greene King pub, with nothing particular of its own. Cleanliness has been hit and miss on my visits. The food is fine and the drinks are fine, and fine is all either of them are. The riverside outdoor area is genuinely nice, but there is not much of it and the location means a constant stream of passing traffic on foot and by car.
The reason to skip it is not that it is terrible, it is that you are ninety seconds from much better. The Red Lion at Bishopgate is one of the best pubs in the city. Lollards Pit sits just over the river and is a proper pub: low ceilings, an old building, a quiz machine that makes you feel like you are back in the early noughties, a small bar staffed by lovely people, a nice courtyard out the back, and a room where everyone is friendly.
Walk the extra minute.
The crawl
Seven pubs, north to south and then into the centre, finishing where the night can keep going. This is roughly how I would actually walk it.
- The Artichoke - start where the beer is best and the staff will set you up properly.
- The Leopard - two or three minutes down the road.
- The Adam and Eve - the longest leg of the walk, heading down toward the cathedral. Worth it.
- The Red Lion, Bishopgate - out by the river. If it is summer, this is where you lose an hour.
- Gonzo’s - into the centre, and up to the rooftop if the weather holds.
- The Wildman - cocktails, and time it for the 4pm to 8pm deal if you can.
- The Murderers - finish here, with a great array of choices and a nice evening atmosphere.
Do it in daylight in summer and you get the Red Lion’s terrace and Gonzo’s roof at their best. Do it in winter and lean on the Adam and Eve and the Murderers instead, which are both better in the cold.
If you can time it, come for City of Ale
Norwich runs a city-wide beer festival that other places have since imitated. It was Britain’s first proper beer week, founded in 2011, and it works by driving people into the pubs rather than pulling them into a marquee.
The 2026 edition ran from 21 May to 21 June, its fourteenth year, taking in 51 pubs and 28 breweries. There are eight walkable ale trails, and an app that lets you collect digital stamps as you go and claim a badge for each trail you finish. The trails deliberately route you through parts of the city you would otherwise miss, which is the best thing about them.
Dates move, so check cityofale.org.uk before you build a weekend around it.
Where to stay
Norwich is small enough that staying central solves everything. Every pub on this list is walkable from the middle of the city, and the crawl needs no transport at all, which matters rather a lot when you’re seven pubs in.
The Maids Head on Tombland is the one I would book, and it is a good fit for a trip built around old pubs, because it out-ages all of them. It claims to be the oldest hotel in the UK on the basis that the site has been used for hospitality since around 1090, when Norwich’s first Norman bishop had his palace here. The first inn on the spot turns up in court records in 1287. Catherine of Aragon was entertained here in 1520, both sides occupied it during Kett’s Rebellion in 1549, and from 1762 it was the Norwich end of a coach that ran to London three times a week.
None of which would matter if it were a bad hotel. It isn’t. I’ve stayed a few times when living further out of the city and it was excellent. The oldest parts above ground are 15th century, the bar and snug were added in the late 1500s, and the whole thing has been carefully looked after by its current owners rather than modernised into anonymity. The bar itself is a good showcase of local beer, so you can start the evening without leaving the building.
It also sits about two minutes from the Adam and Eve and a few more from the river, which puts you in the right corner of the city for everything above. You can check availability at the Maids Head here.
One small pleasure: the owners keep classic cars, and you will occasionally see one parked outside or moving through the city.
If you want to compare it against everything else in the centre, the map below covers the lot. Weekends fill up when Norwich City are at home, so book ahead if your dates line up with a fixture.
Pro tips
- The market and the Garnet are a combination. Buy lunch from a stall, take it to a pub table outside, watch the city go past. It costs very little and it is one of the nicest hours you can spend here.
- Sunday is roast day and roasts get booked. Temple Bar and the Black Horse both need a reservation on a Sunday, particularly the Black Horse.
- Check the fixture list. A Norwich City home game changes the character of the whole city centre. The Murderers before kick-off is a genuinely good experience if you want it, and a very busy pub if you don’t.
- The Wildman’s cocktail deal runs 4pm to 8pm daily. Two for £15 across the list, which makes an early evening start worth planning.
- You can bring the dog to all eleven of these. Norwich is good like that. The Black Horse even does a free roast for the dog on Sundays. Two exceptions to plan around: the Wildman does not take dogs on Friday or Saturday evenings, and Gonzo’s suits a dog far better in the afternoon than once the music starts.
If you’re making a weekend of it, the Norfolk coast is under an hour from the city, and Holkham is the best of it: enormous beach, pine woods, and a proper estate to walk off the pints. The rest of our Norfolk guides are here.