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The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) loves everything about British pub culture. And every year, it hands out a bunch of prizes to prove it. It has awards dedicated to good beer and cider, to people who come together to save at risk pubs and, of course, to really great boozers. Now, the organisation has revealed which pubs across the country are the fairest of them all in its Pub Design Awards.
Across four categories, CAMRA’s design awards recognise pubs the ‘the UK’s most visually stunning, lovingly restored and historically significant pubs’.
The headline prize is the Historic England Conservation Award, which recognises a pub conservation that has preserved historical features and also updated certain facilities that will help it better survive in the long-term. For 2026, that top gong went to the Woodman in Birmingham.
Standing proud on a corner in Digbeth, the Woodman was built in 1897 to be used as a pub for the local Ansells brewery. But it moved through different owners and has fallen into disrepair several times over the last 130 years. Most recently, it shuttered in 2022 but reopened in 2024 under the ownership of Union Inns after a careful £300,000 refurbishment. That refurbishment is what earned it CAMRA’s grand prize.
The extensive work on the multi-room pub involved laying out a new wooden floor, cleaning and conserving the historic Minton tiling walls and restoring the ornate woodwork throughout the interior.
CAMRA points out that the Woodman sits next to Old Curzon Street Station, which is set to be reopened as part of HS2. That’ll make it an ‘an impressive first port of call for passengers’ and will hopefully ensure that it’ll stay open for many decades to come.
As for the other three categories at the Design Awards (conversion to pub use, refurbishment and community), the gold medals all went to pubs in London, though St Peter’s Tavern in Liverpool, a former Roman Catholic Church built in 1788, came joint first in the conversion category. The Green Man in Huntington picked up ‘highly commended’ in the refurbishment category after being turned from a mouldy run-down building into a ‘focal point for the village’.
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