3 pubs checked · updated 18 September 2026
The short answer
Oldest claim
Says AD 947. No document from that date has been found.
Grade C · TraditionBy claim, the oldest pub in Gloucestershire is the Porch House in Stow-on-the-Wold, which dates itself to AD 947. By evidence it is the New Inn in Gloucester, built about 1450 by the monk John Twyning for St Peter's Abbey to lodge its visitors and listed Grade I as a mid-fifteenth-century galleried inn — a house that was an inn from the day it opened rather than a building that later took a licence.
Gloucestershire holds both ends of the oldest-pub argument. In Stow-on-the-Wold is one of the most repeated claims in England and one of the least supported: the Porch House's AD 947 rests on tradition, and the radiocarbon date of about AD 1000 usually cited in its defence cannot be traced at all. The buildings archaeologist James Wright asked the county archaeologist, who holds no record of any samples ever being taken from the building, and no report has been published. English Heritage attributes the standing house to the fifteenth century, and no record of an inn here — it was the Eagle and Child, later the Royalist Hotel — appears before the eighteenth century. In Gloucester, meanwhile, is a building whose date nobody argues about, because the abbey that commissioned it wrote the purpose into the plan. The lesson of the county is blunt: where a medieval institution built an inn as an inn, the evidence survives; where a house drifted into selling drink, the date is whatever the sign says. Chipping Campden's Eight Bells shows the ordinary version of the second case, claiming the fourteenth century against a listing that describes seventeenth-century Cotswold ashlar.
The Porch House is a genuinely old honey-stone building on Digbeth Street, with low beams, inglenooks and witch marks scratched into the timber, and it is worth visiting on those terms. Its date is a different matter, and the interesting thing is not that AD 947 is unproven but that the scientific evidence everyone cites for it has no paper trail. We take the argument apart in is the Porch House England’s oldest inn. At the Eight Bells the gap is smaller and easier to see: three centuries between the claimed fourteenth century and the listed fabric, with the passage through to the courtyard and the great hearth genuine enough on their own.
A carriage arch off Northgate Street in Gloucester opens into the courtyard of the New Inn, ringed by three storeys of jettied timber galleries. Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed queen from those galleries in 1553; fire took part of the roof and several bedrooms in May 2018 and the medieval frame came through it. The story that the inn housed pilgrims visiting Edward II’s tomb was first written down in the eighteenth century and may be later colour, which matters less here than it would elsewhere, because the building’s own date does the work. If you want to know how a surveyor reaches a date like that, see how to tell how old a pub is, and for what the word inn meant when the abbey used it, inn, tavern or alehouse. The county comparison is at the oldest pubs in England.
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Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucestershire
The 947 is the house's own claim, though it has faded from its website: the current site says only 'England's oldest inn' and eleven centuries, while the history page archived in September 2020 gave the tradition that part of the building was a hospice built for Aethelmar, Duke of Cornwall in 947AD, quoting a local history published in 2000. The date rests on that tradition. The radiocarbon test usually cited in
Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire
The Eight Bells is described as 14th century by CAMRA and by the inn, with a story that it housed the masons who built St James's church and stored the bells that gave it its name. Historic England lists a C17 Cotswold ashlar building with mullioned and bay windows, a stone slate roof and an inglenook by the stone bay. That is three hundred years short of the claim, and no record of drinking here in the 1300s has
Gloucester, Gloucestershire
The New Inn gives 1450, when the monk John Twyning built it for St Peter's Abbey to lodge visitors — an inn from the start rather than a house that later took a licence. No document states that year: Historic England lists it Grade I as a mid-C15 inn of four ranges around a galleried courtyard, the most complete survival of its kind in Britain, and the Victoria County History of Gloucestershire says the same without
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