Methodology · updated 18 September 2026
How we decide how old a pub really is
Every pub on this site gets three dates and a grade. Here is what each one means, where it comes from, and what would make us change it.
What counts as a pub
A place whose main business is serving drinks to the public over a bar, still trading today: pubs, inns, taverns and alehouses, and their true equivalents abroad — the German Gasthaus, the Dutch brown café, the Czech hospoda, the Mexican cantina, the Australian hotel that is really a pub. Not restaurants, wine bars, cocktail bars, nightclubs, or hotels where the bar is an afterthought.
The test is continuity of use, not continuity of ownership or name. A pub that shut for a refurbishment and reopened is the same pub. A medieval hall that spent five centuries as a house and became a bar in 1987 is an old building with a young pub in it, and we say so.
The three dates
Claimed
The founding year the pub itself uses, on its sign, website or menu. We show it because it is what people search for, not because we endorse it.
First record
The earliest document we can cite that shows drinking-house use on the site: a licence, a map, a court roll, an inventory, a deed.
Building
The age of the standing fabric, usually from a listing entry, tree-ring dating or an architectural survey. Old walls do not make an old pub.
The age ribbon on every pub page draws all three on one fixed scale, AD 500 to today, so any two pubs can be compared at a glance. The red ring is the claim. The hatched stretch is the years the pub claims but no document confirms. The solid green bar is the years on record. The brass diamond is the building, dated from its fabric. Every ribbon also carries the same information as plain text for screen readers.
The grades
A record of an inn, tavern or alehouse at or near the claimed date, or earlier than it.
The George Inn — claims 1397, first recorded 1432.
The building is documented to the claimed age and drinking use is plausible, but the first record as a pub comes later.
Kyteler's Inn — claims 1263, first recorded 1639.
Tradition only, a date repeated without a source, or a claim historians have tested and rejected.
Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem — claims 1189, first recorded 1751.
Of the 100 pubs currently in the Top 100, 8 grade A, 10 grade B and 82 grade C. That ratio is the single most useful fact on this site: the overwhelming majority of famous oldest-pub claims have no document behind them at the date they claim.
How the Top 100 is ranked
- By claimed founding year, oldest first, because that is the public claim being tested. Ties break on first record, then on grade, then alphabetically.
- Only pubs trading when last checked are ranked. A pub that closes moves to Lost old pubs and everything below it moves up.
- A building that became a pub after 1750 keeps its page but does not enter the Top 100. The ranking measures pubs, not walls.
- You can re-sort the list by first record at any time. The grade travels with the pub, so the same pub looks very different in the two orders — which is the point.
The ranking is rebuilt from the data on every deploy. Nothing is pinned by hand, so a correction we accept today changes the list today.
Sources we trust, and how we check trading status
National heritage lists come first: Historic England, Cadw, Historic Environment Scotland, the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage, the National Register of Historic Places and their equivalents. Then published dendrochronology, local record offices and county archives, and peer-reviewed local history. Then CAMRA surveys and trade press. A pub's own history page is a source for what the pub claims, and we label it that way; it is never a source for what happened.
Every pub page lists its sources in full, and every date on this site has at least two behind it before the pub gets a page at all — two different publishers, not two links. Two pages of the same organisation count once, and so do a pub's own website and an archived copy of it. Where the sources disagree, we say they disagree rather than picking the more flattering one.
Trading status is re-checked monthly against the pub's own channels, its pub company or brewery, CAMRA and recent local news. Each page shows the month it was last looked at. A pub is only marked closed once a closure is recorded somewhere we can cite; a dark window on a Tuesday is not evidence.
What would make us change our mind
A document. A licensing roll, a rental, a probate inventory, a manorial court entry, a dated deed, a tree-ring report — anything that puts drinking-house use on the site earlier than the date we currently show. Send it and we will read it, raise the grade if it holds, and log the change publicly with the date and what changed.
We will also correct in the other direction. If a claim we have graded generously turns out to rest on a Victorian invention, that pub drops, and the corrections log records that too.
Every grade on the site, with the claim it was given against and the record behind it, is in the dataset — free to download and reuse with credit, so an argument with our reasoning can be had over the same rows we used.