Pub Thoughts #12 (The King Billy, Nottingham)

The World’s Greatest Pub Blogger, RetiredMartin, will occasionally consider a pub one of his Top 100. This place, The King Billy, is one of them. And rightly so. It is unlikely I will ever visit as many pubs as Martin, and will certainly never reach his levels of Pub Expertise, but this pub is definitely in my top 100 too. And probably quite high in that list too. It’s a magical pub. Sometimes you enter a pub and right away know that it just works. It is cosy, almost a little too cosy for comfort, but that gives it this immediate sense of hubbub and homeliness and place. There are different spaces, each with a slightly different feel, yet all part of a whole. There’s a bar in the middle that feels a little like a cockpit, serving each space and orchestrating the pub-ness, driving it even, a centrifugal force that influences the whole interior, that doesn’t just hand out the drinks but sets the tone, the feel, the fun. All good pubs feel like someone’s living room. A public house,…