Time, gents, please: the battle to be Britain’s oldest pub
As our ancient inns contest the title, lockdowns have threatened them all. Charlotte Lytton reports
News of the closure of Ye Olde Fighting Cocks in St Albans has ricocheted around the world, the imminent shuttering of “England’s oldest pub” devastating patrons from America to Australia. Such has been the outpouring over an institution dating back to 793AD that the landlord, forced into administration by the Covid downturn, now hopes to have found a buyer to keep it open after all.
Equally overegged may be that title – the oldest pub in England – which Guinness World Records, in fact, retired 22 years ago. The St Albans outpost did once hold it, Guinness says, but they have “never been able to state definitively which [pub] was the oldest”. Will Britain’s inaugural boozer please stand up?
“The Trip! The Trip on the Rock!” proclaims Michael Colton, a former member of the Campaign for Real Ale. He is certain that Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, to give it its proper name – the Nottingham landmark resting against Castle Rock, on which the walls of the city’s castle are built – deserves the title. Certainly, “established in 1189” looms in large black letters on its white walls.
But we are five minutes up the road at the Bell Inn – “Nottingham’s Oldest Inn”, if you believe the frontage – and closer still is Ye Olde Salutation Inn (“the Sal”), which, you guessed it, makes the very same claim.
The accolade is so fiercely squabbled over in this half-kilometre radius that Time Team’s diggers turned up 25 years ago to put the matter to bed – deciding inconclusively that the Trip was attached to the oldest caves, the Sal the oldest building, and that the Bell Inn was the site of the oldest pub.
Unsurprisingly, that verdict ruffled a few feathers. The Trip “is a beautiful pub”, says Jason Weston, landlord at the Sal, “but it’s a fabricated history. If you put a date on the wall, people will believe it.” Still, this ongoing rivalry benefits all three Nottingham outposts, Weston adds, as visitors are determined to judge which has been around longest for themselves.
And where the popular vote is concerned, the Trip is strides ahead. On Thursday morning, Tony Pearson is out front, taking snaps; seeing the pub has long been on the Bournemouth resident’s “bucket list”, he says – even if the establishment is now affiliated with Greene King, rather than King Richard the Lionheart. Pearson thinks Ye Olde Fighting Cocks is England’s oldest, but the Trip’s lore links it to the Crusaders, who stopped off – or, in Old English, had a “trip” here – before continuing to battle, making it somewhere he has wanted to visit “for years”.
The place is crammed full of crannies and myths and tales of madness. There’s the Cursed Galleon, a cobweb-laden ship replica currently cased in plastic because it caused too many mysterious deaths among those who touched it; and the Pregnancy Chair, which would cause life to bloom within those who perched on it (off for repairs today, as someone recently went through it).
For Andy Robbins, who has “been to other places that claim to be the oldest pub in Britain”, the Trip is at least his oldest regular haunt, having frequented it 40 years ago when living in Nottingham. Returning this week for the first time since the early 80s, he says the pub has always felt ancient: “You’d be there having a pint and suddenly something would drop out of the ceiling into your pint,” he remembers of his post-rugby match drinking sessions. “I don’t think it’s changed at all.”
So how much stock is there in a boozer’s birth certificate? John Warland, author of Liquid History: An Illustrated Guide to London’s Greatest Pubs, says the verification system has become seriously muddled. “It depends how you judge it. If you examine which one has been a public house operating continually in that spot for the longest, it gives you a different result than for something that, for a couple of hundred years, was not a pub and then returned to that use at a later stage,” he explains.
Still, the battle to be first means pubs have taken to carbon-dating bits of beams or flagstone flooring to determine the oldest “bit” to hitch their history to.
Other contenders include the Royal Standard of England in Beaconsfield (c.1213), the Old Ferry Boat Inn in St Ives, Cambridgeshire (which proprietors date back to 560), and Stow-on-the-Wold’s Porch House (947).
Warland leads pub history tours around the capital, and says that, without fail, “the oldest” hostelry is what everybody asks to visit. Knowing that you’re sitting on a piece of history is “the cherry on the cake” of a pub visit, he says. One of his favourites is Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street, rebuilt after the Great Fire of London in 1666: “It gives you a sense of history, and there’s no background music, there’s no mobile phones, there’s no laptops allowed. It’s a time capsule and can take you to another place.”
In Nottingham, time periods also collide at the Sal, where the land was granted in 1074, and one remaining part of the building was constructed in 1240; since 1957, it has been a rock and bikers’ bar. The notion would amuse the place’s early punters, Weston thinks, explaining that Oliver Cromwell and Charles I used the pub as a recruitment ground for civil war soldiers (Charles bagsied Mondays and Wednesdays, Cromwell Tuesdays and Thursdays).
Knowing the history of the place – and sharing it with today’s customers – is crucial, Weston believes, and something he plans to do at The Dolphin, a 16th-century watering hole in Derby whose keys he is picking up in May.
“Pubs aren’t just about going out and getting bladdered,” he says. “If the brickwork could talk... [The Sal] has been through three plagues, two world wars plus civil wars, and various other uprisings. There’s a lot of things it’s seen and a lot of things it’s been through and it’s still here.”
“Oldest” may not be the most important metric, but “old” is – and “it’d be a pity to see any of our old pubs go”, says Weston.
The industry has a long road to rebuilding ahead. Just as Covid came for Ye Olde Fighting Cocks, it did for 2,000 other pubs forced to close as a result of the pandemic.
Hilaire Belloc said: “When you have lost your inns, drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England.” For Weston, the past two years have crystallised the fact that pubs “are very much the cornerstones of the community”, and “that history needs to be saved.” Even if it isn’t quite as ancient as it purports.