Every February, Derby's CAMRA branch counts the beer. Eight pub crawls, sixty-eight pubs, and the last census came back at 290 real ales — 176 of them different — which works out at 4.3 a pub. The branch was founded here on 3 July 1974, has a plaque to prove it, and calls Derby the Real Ale Capital of Britain per head of population. Nobody local seems inclined to argue.
Ye Olde Dolphin Inne, on Queen Street beside the Cathedral, is the oldest of them. It's timber-framed, Grade II listed, a warren of low-beamed rooms, and its licence is said to date to 1580. A few minutes away, the Brunswick Inn occupies a triangular Regency building in the old railway-workers' district and brews its own beer on site, visible to customers — Derby's oldest micro-brewery, in a pub that sat empty until the Civic Society restored it and reopened it in 1987 as the city's first multiple-choice ale house.
The Old Silk Mill, named for the mill next door, took Best Pub at the 2024 Marketing Derby Food & Drink Awards. The Falstaff (known locally as the Folly) and Mr Grundy's Tavern both brew their own too.
Base yourself in the Cathedral Quarter, the historic heart, which runs along Iron Gate, Sadler Gate and The Strand. It's a few minutes' walk of Victorian arcades, café tables and independent shops, the nineteenth-century Strand Arcade among them.
On Sadler Gate you'll find Seasons by Bennetts, which began in 1734 as an ironmonger and claims to be the oldest department store in the world. Round the corner, the Market Hall reopened in May 2025 after a £35.1m restoration and pulled in 34,500 people in its first three days. Bailey's Fishmongers has traded there for sixty-five years and stayed open through the entire rebuild.
For dinner, The Pepperpot occupies the restored former Derbyshire Royal Infirmary on London Road, where head chef Dan Fincher holds two AA Rosettes and a weekly-changing menu. South of the centre, along Normanton and Uttoxeter New Road, is the curry belt — Balti International, The Viceroy, Himalayan Gurkha for Nepalese. In the Cathedral Quarter, Lorentes does Spanish produce down to chistorra sausage from Pamplona, and BOA does Korean fried cauliflower and honey-glazed chorizo.
Derby Cathedral has a 212-foot Perpendicular tower, among the tallest church towers in England, and inside it the tomb of Bess of Hardwick, which she designed herself. Peregrine falcons have nested on the tower since 2006 and raise chicks most years, watched on webcam across the city.
The River Derwent runs through, and on an island in it stands Lombe's Mill — the first successful factory in the world, built in the 1720s from silk-throwing secrets John Lombe smuggled out of Piedmont. It's now the Museum of Making, free to enter. Derby went on to build the Merlin engine that powered the Spitfire, and has built trains without interruption since 1839.
For a day out of doors there's Markeaton Park, with its boating lake and light railway, and Darley Park along the river, which holds Britain's largest collection of hydrangeas and a café in the last surviving room of a demolished hall.
Trains run twice an hour to St Pancras, fastest in 1hr 25min; the station is a ten-minute walk from the middle of everything. The peregrines don't commute.