Best Pubs and Bars in Newcastle City Centre

Newcastle has no shortage of places to drink, but the ones worth going out of your way for tend to have something behind the bar beyond the beer: a listed interior, a folk club that has been running for decades, a working gin still, or a view down the Tyne. This guide picks out the city centre pubs and bars we think are worth planning an evening around, plus the Ouseburn cluster a short walk downhill that has become the best beer-and-music crawl in the North East.

Crown Posada

The Crown Posada is the one to show visitors. It occupies a tall, narrow building on The Side, on the steep curve of road dropping from St Nicholas Cathedral towards the Quayside, and the present pub dates from 1880 to a design by the local architect W L Newcombe. It is Grade II listed, and the listing reflects how little has been stripped out: a pair of Pre-Raphaelite style stained glass windows onto the street, an elaborate plaster ceiling, mirrored panels along one wall and a run of small snug booths behind the door.

The layout is famously tight, a single long room barely wide enough for two people to pass at the bar. It is run by the Newcastle brewer and pub operator Sir John Fitzgerald, and the appeal is deliberately old fashioned: no televisions, no fruit machines, and music from a record player rather than a sound system, so conversation carries. There is a rotating cask selection alongside the regulars, and the pub is a fixture on real ale trails through the city.

Best for: Conversation, stained glass, a first or last stop on a Quayside walk.

The Bridge Hotel

The Bridge Hotel stands at Castle Garth, wedged between the Castle Keep and the approach to Robert Stephenson's High Level Bridge. The present building went up in 1901 for the brewer J Fitzgerald, designed by the Newcastle practice Cackett and Burns Dick, the firm later responsible for the Laing Art Gallery, and it was listed Grade II in 1987. The main bar is a generous, high-ceilinged room broken into distinct seating areas with a raised section at the rear and a great deal of original stained glass. Windows and the back terrace look over a surviving stretch of the medieval town wall towards the river and Gateshead.

It still trades as a straightforward cask ale pub with changing guest beers, and the upstairs function room is the other half of its reputation: it has housed a folk club since 1958, one of the longest-running in the country, and continues to host live music and club nights. Central Station and the Castle Keep are both a few minutes away.

Best for: Live folk and traditional music, castle views, a proper pint of cask.

The Centurion

The Centurion is inside Newcastle Central Station on Neville Street, in a room built in 1893 as a waiting lounge for first class passengers. The defining feature is the ceramic work: walls and ceiling covered in richly coloured glazed tiling by Burmantofts of Leeds, among the most complete surviving schemes of its kind outside a museum collection. The lounge closed in the 1960s and the space spent years in humbler use, as police cells and then a storeroom, before the tiles were restored and the room reopened as a bar in 2002.

The scale of it, high ceiling and deep arched recesses, is unusual for a station bar. There is cask ale at the bar and a cafe counter to one side backing onto platform one for anyone in a hurry. Because it sits on the concourse it fills and empties with the timetable, which makes it a natural meeting point before a match at St James' Park or a night out around Neville Street.

Best for: Meeting friends off a train, Victorian tilework, a pint before kick-off.

Bealim House

Bealim House sits on Gallowgate in a converted former print works, on the western edge of the centre a short walk from St James' Park and the Chinatown arch. Run by the Vaulkhard Group, it is home to the Newcastle Gin Company and has a working gin still on the premises. The building's industrial past has been left visible rather than plastered over: bare varnished brickwork, exposed structure, wooden floors and big windows onto Gallowgate, with seating spread across one large room and a mezzanine.

The drinks list leans on that distilling connection, with gin flights and cocktails built around the house spirit alongside a wider bar range and a food menu. Gin and cocktail masterclasses are a regular fixture, which makes it a common choice for group bookings and birthdays. Its position also puts the Bigg Market, Newgate Street and the Grainger Town streets within easy reach.

Best for: Cocktails, group bookings and masterclasses, match days at Gallowgate.

The Ouseburn cluster

Ten minutes downhill from the city centre, the Ouseburn Valley is where Newcastle keeps its best concentration of independent pubs. Three of them can be done comfortably in an evening. The valley is our sister site's patch, so for the full crawl, including the venues further down towards the river, see best pubs and bars in Ouseburn on Heaton.live.

The Cluny on Lime Street is a bar, cafe and live music venue in a building completed in 1848 as a flax spinning mill designed by John Dobson, the architect behind much of Georgian and early Victorian Newcastle. It later became a Scotch whisky bottling plant called the Cluny, which is where the name comes from, and the bar opened in 1999. The main room holds around 300 and has a long-standing reputation as one of the best mid-sized stages in the North East, taking touring indie, folk, jazz and experimental acts as well as local bills, with the smaller Cluny 2 next door for early-career and club-night programming. Away from gig times it works as a proper bar and kitchen.

The Cumberland Arms on James Place Street, off Byker Bank, stands on the bank above the lower valley with views over its old industrial bottom. First licensed as a beer house in 1862, the present three-storey building dates from 1899. Nothing about it feels engineered: bare boards, a small front bar, a back bar used for sessions and a terrace out front that fills on warm evenings. Drink is the main event, with changing cask ales from independent breweries, two house beers brewed for the pub by Allendale in collaboration with The Old Coal Yard, and typically up to eight ciders and perries. The upstairs room hosts gigs, comedy from The Suggestibles and Liveoke nights, while traditional folk sessions run in the back bar.

Free Trade Inn is up on St Lawrence Road, on the bank above the Tyne where the Quayside walk runs east past the mouth of the Ouseburn. The present building went up in 1896 to designs by the Newcastle practice Oswald and Son, and the interior has never been prettified: bare walls, mismatched furniture, well-used bench seating and a downstairs toilet covered in decades of graffiti. What draws people up the hill is the view, with the beer garden and terrace looking straight down the river to the Tyne Bridge and the Gateshead bank. It is a serious beer pub, with a rotating cask line-up and a strong keg and can range leaning heavily on North East breweries, and street food pop-ups appear regularly. It is dog friendly and busy through summer evenings.

Best for: A walkable crawl, independent beer and cider, live music, the best river view in the city.

Wylam Brewery

Wylam Brewery is the outlier on this list, and worth the short walk north from Haymarket. The brewery began in 2000 at South Houghton Farm in Heddon-on-the-Wall, and in 2016 moved into the Palace of Arts in Exhibition Park, installing a 30-barrel brewing kit. The building is the sole survivor of the 1929 North East Coast Exhibition, a single-storey steel-framed, concrete-clad art deco pavilion originally built to display artwork from around the world, and it is Grade II listed. Rather than hide the brewing away, the tanks and taproom share the same striking Grand Hall.

The Brewery Tap and Kitchen opens towards the end of the week, serving the core range and specials alongside food described as traditional British with a North East accent, and guided tours run on Saturday mornings taking in the brewing process, the history of the business and a tasting of four beers. The Grand Hall also works as an events venue for several hundred people, hosting live music, weddings and street food festivals. The Great North Museum is close by if you are making an afternoon of it.

Best for: Brewery tours, taproom afternoons, combining a pint with Exhibition Park.

Planning a crawl

If you have one evening, the historic core does most of the work: start at The Centurion as you come out of Central Station, walk up through Grainger Town to The Bridge Hotel at Castle Garth, then drop down The Side to the Crown Posada and on to the Quayside. If you would rather spend the night on independent beer and live music, skip the centre and head straight for the Ouseburn, where The Cluny, The Cumberland Arms and the Free Trade Inn sit within a few minutes of each other. Check what is on before you go, as the gig and session calendars fill up quickly at all three.

Think we have missed a Newcastle pub that belongs on this list? Get in touch via our contact page.