England’s oldest pubs
Plenty of English pubs claim to be the oldest in the country. Some say they date back a thousand years, that they appear in the Domesday Book, or that they once served Saxons and Vikings. In October 2026, The Guardian reported on the work of Dr James Wright, a buildings archaeologist and author of Historic Building Mythbusting, who looked into these claims on behalf of Historic England. His verdict: none of them stand up. There are, for example, no pubs mentioned in the Domesday Book at all.
Instead, Wright drew up his own list of England’s oldest pubs, based on archaeological and archival evidence and on tree-ring dating (dendrochronology) of their timbers. To make the list, a pub had to have been purpose-built as a public house, to have stayed in continuous use as one, and to still contain a substantial part of its original fabric. The oldest of them turn out to date from the 14th and 15th centuries, with the George Inn at Norton St Philip in Somerset taking the top spot.
The table and the map below show the twelve pubs on Wright’s list. The dates are those given in the article.
Source: Helena Horton, “Which is really England’s oldest pub? Tree-ring dating helps settle debate”, The Guardian, 23 October 2026.
The list
The pubs are numbered in the order of Wright’s list, and the same numbers appear on the map. The table can also be sorted by pub name or county by clicking on the column headers marked with a double-arrow icon. Click on a row to show that pub on the map.
All twelve pubs are listed buildings. The “Listing” links lead to each building’s entry in Historic England’s National Heritage List for England, which describes the building and its history. Some of these descriptions were written a long time ago and give dates different from Wright’s, which draw on more recent research such as tree-ring dating.
The map
Each marker shows the pub’s number in the table above. Hover the mouse pointer over a marker to see the pub’s name. Click on the marker to open a popup with more details. A blue circle stands for several pubs that are close together (such as the two in Hook and Odiham, Hampshire); click on it to zoom in.
The five buttons in the top left corner of the map are, from top to bottom:
- + and −, which zoom in and out,
- a circular arrow, which resets the map to its original view,
- a magnifying glass, which lets you search for a place by name,
- a dashed square with a plus sign, which lets you drag a box on the map to zoom into it,
- a crosshairs, which is a “Locate Me” button. This location feature is handled entirely within your web browser. Your location is not sent to the server hosting this website.
If you spot a mistake or other issues, please get in touch.