Lairy and garish

In a world where we're surrounded by the architectural and design follies of wobbling bridges and slippery memorial fountains - it doesn't take a university education to work out that water will make a hard surface slippery - the only surprise is that their designers were not sentenced to a long stretch on the dole queue for their efforts.

Bar designers are also occasionally guilty of masturbating their egos with an explosion of colours and nonsense rather than making a venue comfortable and practical for those who are going to use it. I put this down to the current trend for inexperienced proprietors opening bars and relying too heavily on the advice of so-called experts.

In being creative there is a fine line between what is visually stimulating and that which is potentially damaging to the psyche, and Oceans Apart - coincidentally named, perhaps, after Karen Kingsbury's novel about a plane crash - with its riot of colours and almost useless furniture, is the design equivalent of a drive-by shooting.

Take the plastic chairs - go on, please take them, nobody will miss them - that appear to have been designed to support the bum of a four-year-old Vietnamese munchkin. They're impossibly painful to anyone with an average size rear and putting two chairs together - which I tried - didn't solve the problem.

An explanation for these strange goings-on comes in a quote from the designer in the press release, which rationalises the concept as 'an interpretation of what a contemporary Hamlet would choose'. Hamlet was a bit mad, you know - a melancholic killer who contemplated suicide.

To the drinks. An unimaginative range of draught lagers is bettered by an interesting choice of bottled beers such as Budvar, Baltika, Kingfisher, Brugs and Scumpy Jack Cider.

A short wine list is pitched at the lower end of the quality market with bottles of Pinot Grigio (white) and Montepulciano d'Abruzzo (red) available at £9.90 each.

Things buck-up a bit on the cocktail front, with a short list offered with three different base spirits. A Mojito, for example, is served with Havana Club three-year-old rum as standard (£6), and is also offered with Havana seven-year-old (£7), or Bacardi eight-year-old (£8) - a nice touch. There's a happy hour, daily from 5pm-7pm, where cocktails are half price (only with the house spirits).

The food is nearly all Thai - satays, spring rolls, curries and stir-fry dishes with noodles or rice, all of which are reasonably priced in the £5-£6 range for main courses. A small section of the menu lists a few 'European dishes' and this includes a Thai chicken burger with mayonnaise or peanut sauce and potato wedges - I'm not sure which part of Europe this dish hails from.

The good bit about Oceans Apart - there always is a good bit if you look hard enough - is the beer garden at the back of the bar. It's hard to go wrong with B&Q-style decking and, fortunately, they had normal garden furniture when I visited, which means this will make for a great space to while away what's left of the warm weather.