The Telegraph People's Choice Pub of the Year: vote for your favourite boozer (and win £250 of Sawday's vouchers)

Ever since I stumbled on it around 18 months ago, my favourite pub has not boasted an ever-changing roster of craft beers from innovative local breweries, or offered an ethically sourced small plates menu. It doesn’t have immaculately restored shabby-chic period interiors (though it is done out very skilfully, in a distinctive cyber-rustic style). It doesn’t have a website, or a real fire, or I’ve never noticed one lit, and big-screen sport is seldom absent from the television. It boasts not one, but two dartboards.

It attracts a motley crew: Sikhs, posties, plasterers, fans of Southampton FC, tourists (I think there are Airbnb apartments nearby), young Polish women dolled up like R&B stars. It’s not on a National Trail or public footpath; it’s on a gruff stretch of road spanning the two or three miles that separate Southampton General Hospital – where my mother, Wena, was admitted after suffering a stroke in 2017 – from the train station and the city centre.

But if you were to ask me to name my favourite pub in the land, this, the Pig ’N Whistle on Shirley Road, would be it. Others might not think it has award potential, but it gets my vote.

The question is, what gets yours? For the first time, The Telegraph is joining forces with the Sawday’s guides to find the best pub in England, Wales and Scotland, as voted for by the people who eat and drink in them. Sawday’s already awards annual pub prizes in several categories (Best for Food, Authentic Pub, Community Pub, Favourite Newcomer, Best for Rooms and Best for Families) – and 2019 will see the first People’s Choice award, in partnership with this newspaper.

So whether it’s great for thrice-cooked goose-fat chips or serves excellent local bitter, or stands at the heart of its community, or has a particularly renowned collection of horse brasses – you decide.

The pubs that receive the most votes (ask your fellow regulars to vote, too!) will be whittled down by the hardened topers here at The Telegraph to a shortlist from which, after exhaustive field research, we will select the winner.

This will take its place among the pantheon of award-winners in the 2019 Sawday’s Great British Pub Guide (published on June 1), a lavish reboot of its long-running “Inns of England and Wales” books.

As an added incentive, four randomly selected submissions will net their senders £250 to spend on a stay at a Sawday’s inn of their choosing.

But what makes a perfect pub? Alastair Sawday reckons it’s “all about atmosphere – and about lovely people who encourage people to feel at home.  “I especially enjoy pubs that are owned by the community; one can almost smell the enthusiasm and human involvement,” he says.

For me, it’s more intangible. What I like about the Pig ’N Whistle is partly practical, even animalistic: it’s there, it keeps its beer well, it’s cheaper than London and better than other bars I’ve found locally. But over the past several months visiting my mother, first in hospital, now in a nursing home nearby, I have noticed how well run it is. The flowers on the tables are never dead. The surfaces are spotless. The staff are kind to the regulars and courteous to the occasional interloper.

What is more, it’s helped me think about what a pub should be like. A small regular pleasure of my job is to edit the Pint to Pint column, a long-running weekly review of British pubs that appears in our ‘Sunday’ section. I am sure we’ve featured some of the same pubs that have caught the eyes of Sawday and his crack team of “enthusiasts for place” over the past 15 years. Some of our regulars, together with Telegraph food writers and editors, have supplied their nominations (right) to set the ball rolling.

When a new Pint writer comes into the fold, they will often ask about our criteria for inclusion, given that the column is devoted to celebrating good pubs rather than monstering bad ones, and I’ll mumble something about open fires, heritage, quality of beer, atmosphere, community and so forth.

And then I will tell them that they can ignore all of that – even, within reason, the beer – if they have found somewhere that just feels right. And I hope that’s what you’ll do when you send us your nominations for The Telegraph People’s Choice Pub of the Year. Go on, you know you want to.

Telegraph writers pick their favourite pubs

Xanthe Clay: The Highbury Vaults, Bristol

The Highbury is a proper pub. There are no slot machines, there’s no television and no piped muzak, but there is well-kept beer, cheerful staff and bar billiards. It’s in the heart of the university district, and five minutes’ walk from the hospital, so there are plenty of students packed into the partly covered back garden, while academics and doctors prefer the labyrinth of wooden-floored rooms that make up the interior. Book groups and local societies, including my ramshackle poetry club, reserve the tiny front bar for meetings.

The building dates back 200 years, and allegedly is where prisoners were taken for their last meals before being hanged on the St Michael’s Hill gallows. It still has an offbeat feel – there’s graffiti by local artist Norman Walker on the side of the building and until recently a sign outside read “Last pub for 20 yards.” The food is decent and home cooked, without taking over from the essential function of the pub, as a place to meet and drink a pint. If you’re lucky, the cook will whip up some huge sausage rolls to hawk around the customers. Don’t pass one up: they are hot and savoury with flaky pastry as dark as the leather-covered benches that line the pub. The beer is strictly real ale – there’s no trendy American craft ale on tap – but there is a small but frequently changing choice of guest beers.

164 St Michael’s Hill, Bristol, BS2 8DE

Stephen Harris:  The Duke of Cumberland, Whitstable, Kent

My hometown of Whitstable used to have a pub on every street corner,  but they are disappearing fast. I loved walking through the backstreets on a Saturday night, hearing the noise coming from the nearby pub before the pub on the next corner’s noise could be heard above it. They were full of the people who lived in the street and any interlopers would  have to be ready for suspicious  looks from the regulars if they fancied a pint.

The Duke of Cumberland is in the centre of Whitstable and is run by an old friend from my punk days, Tony Tarrats. In tricky times, he has found a niche by booking great bands. Last month, he had the Hot 8 Brass band from New Orleans. They were in the UK filming Jools Holland’s new year programme and they put on a family-friendly gig. It was great fun to be able to take our son Stan to a gig at the end of our road with a lot of his friends from school.

High Street, Whitstable CT5 1AP

Chris Arnot: The Holly Bush, Makeney, Derbyshire

Of all the beer joints in all the towns in all the UK, I’d have to walk into the Holly Bush Inn in Makeney, Derbyshire (albeit after three trains and a bus ride). Marston’s Pedigree is served straight from a cask in the cellar; Timothy Taylor’s Landlord from one of several hand-pumps in a low-beamed bar with padded settles and a log fire.

It’s even warmer in the snug, where regulars chew the fat and sometimes chestnuts roasted on a black-leaded range. Robust pork pies are supplied by the local butcher and game pies are available, in season, when one of the regulars leaves pheasants outside the door.

Holly Bush Lane, Makeney, Belper, Derbyshire DE56 0RX

Victoria Moore: The Beckford Arms, Tisbury, Wiltshire

A good pub is a refuge. Its first duty is to allow you to feel at ease as soon as you walk in. Plenty do this very well and very simply, but the ivy-covered Beckford Arms – a favourite of the shooting set – goes the smart way. Run by Dan Brod, Charlie Luxton and Matt Greenlees, the first two of whom once worked for Soho House & Co – this is half pub, half country-house hotel.

Locals praise the inviting bar with fireplace, local ales and negroni on tap, clever wine list (the Beckford Bottle Shops in Tisbury and Bath are part of the same group), and the fact you can still order a classic pork pie, ploughman’s or fish and chips.

Fonthill Gifford, Tisbury, Wiltshire SP3 6PX

Christopher Hirst: The Jolly Woodman, Beckenham, Kent

A platonically perfect rural pub magically transported to an ancient thoroughfare in the outer suburbs of London, the Jolly Woodman gains from what it lacks: no music, no television (except rugby), no games machines, no carpet. Just beer – especially Timothy Taylor’s Landlord, as exemplary as the pub’s actual landlord, Joe Duffy. Having recently moved to North Yorkshire, I find that the Woodman is the single thing that I miss most.

9 Chancery Lane, Beckenham, Kent BR3 6NR

Alastair Gilmour: The Free Trade Inn, Newcastle upon Tyne

The late Tyneside singer/songwriter Alex Glasgow was surely referring to Newcastle’s Free Trade Inn when composing: “The sunsets, bonny lad/ Oh the sunsets, bonny lad/ There’s a bobby dazzlin’ sunset every day”. The westward view from the pub towards the city’s iconic bridges might be memorable, but its attractions are much greater than heavenly illumination.

The Free Trade is “basic”: it’s intimate and friendly in its nicotine-inspired mantle – and the jukebox is free.  The beer offer is extraordinary, ranging through Belgian specials to local brewers’ classics and envelope-pushing creations, while Donzoko Northern Helles (brewed in Hartlepool) licks anything from Bavaria. The Free Trade gets inside you and stays there, elevating your soul with bobby dazzlin-osity.

12 St Lawrence Road, Byker, Newcastle NE6 1AP

Adrian Tierney-Jones: The Bridge Inn, Topsham, Devon

Saturday lunchtime: a hefty pint glass of a mahogany-hued old ale sits on the table in front of me, in a room brushed with the warmth of a coal fire. Voices flutter from the corridor alongside the clink of glass as beer is served. There’s a tranquillity about this moment, even as the traffic buzzes by outside.

The Bridge has been here for a long time, run by the same family since the late 19th century. It’s a cosy, snug and soothing time machine of a pub, sitting alongside the slow swell of the river Clyst as it flows into the nearby Exe.

Bridge Hill, Topsham, Exeter EX3 0QQ

Diana Henry: The Sportsman, Seasalter, Kent

My choice of pub hasn’t changed since I visited in 1999, when it first opened. The Sportsman was one of the first dining pubs, and one of a small handful that has gone from strength to strength but still feels like a pub. Despite its Michelin star (and countless other awards) you can come here for a pint and a plate of roast chicken and stuffing, though most come for a full meal.

The kitchen makes its own butter, bread, cured ham, even salt (they drag buckets of seawater into the kitchen for the salt). The whitewashed building, in a melancholic location outside Whitstable, was buffed up when chef Stephen Harris took it over, but it still feels like a proper boozer (no Farrow & Ball here). Honesty is the watchword.

Faversham Road, Seasalter, Whitstable CT5 4BP