THE Ship Inn in Uphill has been named as one of the winners in this year's Pub of the Year competition.

Readers voted for the best pubs around, and based their decisions on a pub's warm welcome, delicious menu, excellent service and friendly atmosphere. 

The Ship Inn's website reads: "Welcome aboard to the improved experience at The Ship Inn, the oldest pub in Weston-super-Mare.

"In the rural village of Uphill, amongst the ever growing town of Weston-super-Mare, is a lovely open plan bar and restaurant. 

"This family friendly pub is the perfect spot for everybody, dogs included,  to come together and nestle round the open fires, with it’s updated décor, rural feel and fantastic freshly cooked food." 

Owner of the pub, Sharon, told the Mercury: "We've been owners for five years. We took it from a closed pub, we've done an awful lot of work to it.

"We survived Covid, we opened up a village shop at the side of the pub and delivered food hampers to people who were locked in due to high vulnerability, we gave them fruit and vegetables, meats, anything at all.

"We also sold the main ingredient of all: yeast. Everyone became breadmakers in that time.

"We've done a lot of work, we have honeybee hives to produce our own honey, we have our own allotment to grow our own fruit and vegetables for the kitchen.

"In lockdown, we developed a beer garden, there's 30 tables out there with an outside bar. We are just about to put in an outside kitchen as well. We will serve loaded flatbreads, skewers, burgers, posh dogs with chilli on top, that sort of food.

"We are a traditional food pub. We serve homemade steak and ale pies, we make our own chicken tikka sauce, we make our own chilli, everything that we can is made fresh on-site.

"We have full capacity for Christenings, we have a wedding next month. We are quite versatile on what we can do.

"We have six skittles teams, two pool teams, and a darts team. We also have live music on a Sunday, it's all free entertainment. We also do a pub quiz on a Thursday."