In search of Britain’s oldest pub | Hacker News Reader

In search of Britain’s oldest pub

historyextra.com

65 pointsDanBC56 comments

Not sure the question needs a definitive answer, but anything that helps to preserve these pubs as pubs is a-ok with me. I recall heavy sessions in The Red Lion down in Southampton because we were acquainted with the owners some time back, so we would just be locked in, party all night, pass out in the rooms upstairs and then carry on the next day. The pub might have been from the 12th Century, or the 15th, but either way, our flagrant abuse of its premises and hospitality seems entirely in keeping with its history.

Just stay away from the vicious bird...

In Southampton I prefer the Dancing Man, which has only been a pub for a handful of years, but is housed in a building nearer to 700 years old. They brew on site, and it's really good stuff!

> the Dancing Man

Good pub, still refered to as "the wool house" by most locals. Surreal to see disccusion about pubs in Southampton on hackernews this morning!

It is! My excuse is that I lived there for about 9 years, until a year or so back :)

Very surreal, I'm going back 23 years and only because I'm hoping that no one will remember those days.

If you were a student then, I might've bumped into you over a Juicy Lucy in Jesters...

I wasn’t quite and lived in London, we just came to the Red Lion for weekend benders

Ha, I was a student there at that time too. Spent my evenings down the road at the Dungeon though ;)

Oh my, the memories (or lack there of)

When I was at a conference in Birmingham a couple of years ago, I visited a Weatherspoons pub which might not have been the oldest, but definitely had not changed the kegs since the 12th century.

If there’s ever a zombie apocalypse I intend to spend it in a Wetherspoons so I won’t notice

You can use the sticky tables as zombie traps.

(Has anybody been in a Wetherspoons pub that doesn't have sticky tables?)

> Let's go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for this all to blow over.

Submitting this because I find it interesting that there's a bunch of old stuff in England and because there's so much of it we often don't have good quality information about it, and it's not always in good condition.

The article describes New Inn in Gloucester as "This incredibly well-preserved, galleried, courtyard inn", and that's true. But here's the New Inn in Google maps

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.8656679,-2.2453785,3a,83.4...

There's some modern retail unit infill on the ground floor; there are alarm boxes and hanging basket brackets stuck on the walls; and the context of the building has been destroyed - the pavement and surrounding buildings are all modern.

This thing about context is writ large in Gloucester. Here's another example just down the street of a very old building with an unhappy juxtaposition with a more modern building: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.8650378,-2.2462721,3a,75y,...

Here's another example of a not great modern building put up next to an old (1450) building: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Cookes+Coffee+%26+Curios...

(I'm not anti modern building! Many of them are more accessible, beautiful, playful, creative. But, also, lots of them are just rubbish.)

Kinda hard to avoid the juxtaposition though, isn't it? Not like you can conjure suitable old neighbors for these survivors.

For an example of the same thing (except with jarringly more extreme difference between the old and new) in the New World, take a look at Fraunces Tavern in New York City:

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7035379,-74.0113687,3a,75y,2...

The tavern dates from about 1720. So, it's old for America, although nothing special age-wise from a European point of view. But it's almost literally buried in 30 to 50 story glass and steel towers, between Wall Street and The Battery.

I'd agree about the first one, which looks a bit of a mess, but I actually quite enjoy the "another example just down the street of a very old building with an unhappy juxtaposition" example (I quite like brutalist architecture when done well, and like the juxtaposition there). It's a bit of a shame to me that the Costa frontage has replaced what was presumably a rather nice ground floor though. I think what I mind most is blandness, which is in the third example.

I completely agree about blandness!

I live in Cheltenham and there's a bunch of buildings that are about 100-150 years old but they're in not great condition. I would much prefer there to be exciting modern buildings instead of run down older buildings.

My office is in a small-town downtown US building that is that building on the block. Most of the buildings date to the 1870s after a fire nearly leveled the area, with nice brickwork and decorative elements. Ours however is a late-1950s department store with an imposing red brick facade and just a few small windows.

Some years ago a 1930s gangster movie was filmed here and they went out of their way to avoid including our extremely anachronistic building in the shot. I think it snuck into a few frames during a car chase though.

> Nottingham’s Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem is a timber-framed building dating to the 17th century, and was not open for business until the late-18th century

From what I understand the claim about Ye Olde Trip relates more to the caves that form part of the structure and the part they may have played as a gathering point for crusaders heading south, with claims that there was a tavern of some sort on the site, than the existing front of the building.

However they certainly like to imply some sort of continuity of trade so it's interesting to find out different.

Regardless of the veracity of the claims, it's well worth a look at a quiet time, because there aren't that many pubs where the back rooms are literally caves in the bedrock!

In Nottingham is The trip to Jerusalem. It's age as a pub is debated but it's carved into jurassic sandstone, so by one measure ~165 million years old.

wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_Olde_Trip_to_Jerusalem - crappy pics

Pub's page https://www.greeneking-pubs.co.uk/pubs/nottinghamshire/ye-ol... - is shite. The uneven flagstones (walking on them was like being at sea) seem gone, so are all the currency notes people would stick on walls. Basically they've stripped it of its character. And no pics of the sandstone. Sigh, they've destroyed half of what made it.

Even when I was a student there in the 1980s, it had rather sold out to the tourist industry and wasn't frequented much by locals.

However, if you asked nicely, the landlord would allow you to go down into the cellars which are cavernous and were apparently used in the Middle Ages to harbour Jewish people under threat from persecution.

I had always thought that ye olde Cheshire cheese pub would have held this, were it not for the great fire of London.

https://ye-olde-cheshire-cheese.co.uk/

Met my wife in there, oo, some years ago, and I have been disappointed at how clean and shiny it all looks these days. I almost miss the days of smoking being allowed in pubs and the filthy mess they used to be.

I also use to spend a lot of time in there around the time the ban came in downing several pints of ‘man in a box’ at least once a week at a startup with a bit of a drinking culture. The smoke definitely masked the other smells though, once it went away things weren’t great downstairs.

‘man in a box’ sorely missed :(

Just down the road in Angel a pub celebrated its 600th anniversary a few years ago, dating back to 1415, that doesn't even feel particularly old in the UK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Red_Lion,_Islington

The reason it doesn’t look as old as they say is because it was rebuilt.

Good pub that, though :)

Heh

It occurred to me that many of us in Blighty will pop out this lunchtime for a pint and a bite to eat in a pub older than the USA.

I consider the USA to be the rightful successor to George III, and the UK to be the rogue break-away state. Therefore, you're in a pub older than the UK, wrongly kept after The Glorious Revolution!

You know, there's an alternate history slightly plausible where the 1789 Constitutional Convention decided we needed a monarchy, not a republic.

I'm not sure how likely that would have seemed at the time, but if so, they might have crowned someone like say, George Washington as say, George IV of the United Kingdom of American States or some such. And then there might very well be something to your joke!

I suppose it's easy enough for many of you in Blighty to pop out this lunchtime for a pint and a bite to eat in a pub older than the UK itself. As an Australian I'm always surprised at how long ago European colonisation of North America began, but it's probably not too hard to find pubs from before then, as well.

Ah, this is rare, but here in the USA, I used to get drunk with my coworkers back in my 20s at a bar older than the USA.

Before reading on, you can probably guess what region of the USA I was in-- the northeast, which relates to the rest of the US somewhat as Europe relates to the US as a whole.

It was Fraunces Tavern in downtown Manhattan, where George Washington was reputed to spend a lot of his time during the part of his presidency in which Manhattan (then known as New York) was the seat of government, so it was older than 1789 I guess.

It's strange to reflect that on the one hand, this is one of the oldest places in the USA, but on the other hand, it would not be especially old in Europe.

Outside of the northeast and Chicago, almost everything was built in the 20th century, within the lifetime of relatives I've met.

I miss old things so much when I'm in the non-northeast US. I suspect I would really enjoy visiting Europe for this reason.

https://archive.ph/S8acn

As someone that grew up in York I was surprised to not see any mentions of buildings from there. There's quite a lot of buildings from around 1500 but most current day pubs seem to be in buildings that started at houses or commercial properties.

I'm sure some of the brits on here could review each of these as pubs. For my part Ye Olde Fighting Cocks has good beer and food and of course very low ceilings - definitely feels like a very old pub. The George Inn is also very good, although in a much quieter area, and I didn't even notice it was particularly old when I visited, you also start to get suspicious when you go across to the Fleur de Lys and find out that both of these pubs in this tiny tiny village are run by literally the same people - on the day we were there one guy had to run back and forth across the road because they were low on staff.

I was last in the Old Man & Scythe[1] about 15 years ago. It was one of those weird and wonderful cider places. I had a couple and became slowly aware that i couldn't actually use my legs anymore.

Pretty sure at least one other person in the pub had pissed themselves. The two are probably related, and to anyone who has drank around the Bradshawgate in Bolton, this is by no means a reason to disregard a pub.

I eventually regained use of my legs and carefully stumbled home.

11/10

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_Olde_Man_%26_Scythe

I think I've had similar cider - last time I touched the stuff was 1983.

The only other stuff on my "never drink again" list being Norwegian aquavit - funnily enough something I learned to avoid a couple of years later. University life may have been involved.

Things that made me do a double-take this morning: A mention on HN of my hometown of Bolton and Ye Olde Man and Scythe!

Same!

Nice! The Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan in Japan is a hotel founded in AD 705 and has been run by the same family since then, 52 generations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies

I thought it was the Royal Standard in Beaconsfield, but there's no mention of it

It claims to be England's oldest freehouse; not sure how important that distinction is versus "pub," unless it's the whole religious affiliation thing.

There seems to be a suggestion it was "Se Scip" prior to the Restoration in 1663:

https://www.beaconsfieldhistory.org.uk/content/beaconsfield-...

A Freehouse means a pub that is owned independently of the brewery that supplies it. Many pubs are owned by a brewery and rented to someone who runs it (the landlord).

The thing is there’s about 20 pubs in the UK that have a sign on the outside saying “Britain’s oldest pub”

There's a pub where I grew up that claim it's been there since 1040 odd. Not sure of the historical accuracy but the claim is its mention in the domesday book.

Addressed in the article - apparently there are no pubs at all in the domesday book!

Ye Olde Yew Tree is oldest near me 1348, not a bad pub too!

https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowUserReviews-g8521445-d2037...

Has some random relationship with Dick Turpin!

I'm a little surprised there's no mention of The Royal Standard, although apparently it's not exciting enough to have its own Wikipedia page.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forty_Green,_Penn

Especially considering, if the Wikipedia information is correct, it seems to meet the criteria and best the 15th century ones that conclude the OP.

A lovely pub for food and drink - I believe parts of Hot Fuzz were also filmed there.

I would have expected it to be at a seaport. The kinds of place which brew for local consumption might come and go but a place at an entrepot tends to stay.

Or, be associated either with a monastery or a baronial estate.

The ship of Theseus comes to mind. Surely some of these were not in continuous operation, changed owners or moved buildings. Is that the same pub then?

A large part of the article concerns this. There’s mention of a pub that’s in a building from the 11c though it didn’t start being used as a pub until the 15c.

It’s currently got a huge picture of an angelic nurse with two face masks on its side. https://www.theoldinnandrestaurant.co.uk/

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