WHEN I arrive at the Regency Tavern, the bartender is having a fag outside in the mist.

Indoors, a glassy-eyed punter is nursing a clear drink and staring into oblivion.

There’s no one else in this long-standing boozer off Brighton’s Russell Square. The place is ghostly quiet. It doesn’t seem to have woken up.

Then the barman comes back, and the joint slowly begins to come alive.

Another customer takes a perch on a leopard print stool at the bar and the (actually very friendly) bar keeper fixes me a drink.

It’s 2pm, not a fair time to catch a late-night watering hole off guard.

A screen displays photos of last night’s revellers hurtling about the bar with drag acts, lasers, and karaoke.

The toilets are testimony to all the fun. Dimly lit by a spinning green polka-dot strobe, they give me flashbacks of the dank cave-themed dunny at the Tempest Inn. There are karaoke posters on the wall.

The atmosphere would have been far less dejected if I’d walked in 20 minutes later. Piece by piece, from the lights on the beer taps to the clink of glasses out of the dishwasher, the place begins to stir.

The bartender fires up the jukebox and the Rolling Stones ring out across the bar.

If you barged through the double doors of the Regency Tavern at precisely 2.20pm yesterday, you would have found it a stubborn touch of glamour in the mist.

You’d probably have felt like strutting in with a pout, hand on hip, and a Mick Jagger swagger.

This place has got a lot of style.

The wallpaper is striped gaudy pink and gold.

The rooms are crammed with mirrors in gilt frames, classical busts, crystal chandeliers, and portraits of the Prince Regent himself.

The Regency Tavern is one of two pubs still standing in Brighton to have applied for the city’s original beer shop licences in 1830.

You could mistake the regal old paintings for windows into the next room, if it weren’t for the Stones’ thumping blues dragging you back to the present.

A gold theatre curtain hangs above the bar.

Sparkling cupid statues fly from the walls, and by the window there’s a whopping great sculpture of a royal crest complete with a lion and a unicorn.

There are old school Tiffany table lamps, tasselled curtains, and red queue ropes.

And for the later on, there’s a heavy-duty lighting rig waiting in the wings.

It’s part royal drawing room, part your nan’s front room, and part VIP club.

I take a seat on a crushed velvet pew and peruse the menu.

There’s a dedicated gin list with a rhubarb number and one variety said to have notes of “pecan and soft citrus”. They come with a gold straw.

A blackboard offers “three shots or bombs £10’”, a glass of wine is £3.80, and there’s a good selection of beers on tap.

Everything seems to be in order here.

A pie and gravy costs £7.50. You can have one called a “Kevin”, filled with quinoa, “baby onions” and chestnut mushrooms.

You can eat it next to a sculpture of a swan with a tuft of grass sprouting from its back. Or you could sit down to the strains of one of the pianists the place hosts to perform pop songs and show tunes.

On the way out, I brush past hanging baskets blooming with pink flowers and a string of pink fairy lights.

The Regency Tavern bills itself as “fabulously flamboyant”, and “the most glamorous pub in Brighton”.

Catch it at the right moment, and that’s probably not far off the mark. See for yourself – just give it time to catch its beauty sleep.

Regency Tavern

Russell Square

Brighton

Decor

Four stars

Part royal drawing room, part your nan’s front room, and part VIP club.

Drink and price

Four stars

A blackboard offers “three shots or bombs £10’”, a glass of wine is £3.80, and there’s a good selection of beers on tap. Everything seems to be in order here.

Atmosphere

Four stars

Catch it at the right moment, and the place lives up to its reputation as “the most glamorous pub in Brighton”

Staff

Five stars

I met the bartender smoking a fag outside the front. He turned out to be lovely.