3 pubs checked · updated 25 October 2026
The short answer
Oldest claim
Says 1780. No document from that date has been found.
Grade C · TraditionBy claim, the oldest pub in Guernsey is the Albion House Tavern on Church Square in St Peter Port, where CAMRA says a tavern has stood since 1780. No deed, licence or directory behind that year has been traced, and the island has no oldest-by-evidence answer at all: no dated account of drink being sold in a house still pouring has been traced earlier than a Guernsey woman's recollection of the Albion in the 1860s and a newspaper account of the Mermaid Tavern on Herm in 1952. The house the island itself called its oldest, the Plough at Vauvert, stopped trading in July 2025.
Guernsey is the hardest place on this site to date a pub, and the reasons are specific rather than general. The island does keep a register of protected buildings, which is the kind of document that settles these questions in England and Wales — but it is published only through the States of Guernsey website, and that site has answered every request made of it with a server error, on three separate attempts across six weeks. CAMRA's Channel Islands branch, which covers the island in place of any national heritage body, carries a founding date for exactly one Guernsey house. The Brewery History Society's list of Guernsey Brewery pubs runs to about fifty names and dates none of them. The Priaulx Library in St Peter Port, whose article archive is both excellent and properly searchable, has nothing filed under the names of the houses that survive: its harbour reminiscences put a hotel on the site of today's Ship & Crown before the beach there was built over in 1853, and name the Crown Hotel at the coal quay, but no publisher has yet joined a founding year to a Guernsey pub that is still pouring. So this page is three houses, one of them believed to be trading rather than confirmed, and a fourth in the archive — and the thinness is the finding, not a gap we are hiding.
Both town houses on this page stand on squares a few minutes’ walk apart, and both are small. The Albion House Tavern is the one with the record: it sits against the Town Church’s churchyard, close enough that Guinness recognises it as the closest tavern to a church in the British Isles, and CAMRA dates a tavern on the site to 1780. The Priaulx Library’s publication of a Guernsey woman’s recollections of the 1860s puts the Albion Hotel on Church Square with dwelling houses at its west gable and a cider store underneath — eighty years after the claimed date rather than at it, and the earliest independent account of the house in trade that we have found. The Britannia on Trinity Square is a locals’ bar at the edge of the town centre, supplied by the Liberation Group. A founding year of 1840 circulates in visitors’ accounts and no publisher stands behind it, so the page says so rather than printing it as a claim.
The Mermaid Tavern is on Herm, which is part of the Parish of St Peter Port and a boat ride from the town, and it is the most interesting of the three precisely because it has no date at all. Herm’s own history gives the island an inn from 1810 and Samuel Lewis’s topographical dictionary of 1831 records an inn, a brewery and a bakehouse built for four hundred quarrymen, and nobody has tied either to the building the Mermaid occupies. What the tavern does have is a record of being full: on the night of 4 January 1952 a wartime mine drifting off the harbour exploded, and the account the Priaulx Library prints has the drinkers on the floor, one man at the bar and another’s chalk running down the darts scoreboard.
Three routes would change this page, and all three need a person rather than a script. The protected buildings register, if the States website is ever readable, dates fabric and would settle the Albion’s eighteenth century one way or the other. The Guernsey Press keeps history columns that its own search does not surface. And the Priaulx holds licensing and newspaper material that is catalogued but not online, which is where a first record of drink for any of these houses is most likely to be sitting. For how we weigh a claim against a record see our methodology; for the island next door, which has the same problem and more granite, see the oldest pubs in Jersey.
Coastlines: Natural Earth · Pub locations ©OpenStreetMap contributorsNatural Earth · ©OpenStreetMap contributors
OpenFreeMap · © OpenMapTiles · Data © OpenStreetMap contributors
Map tiles unavailable — showing the outline map.
St Peter Port, Guernsey
The 1780 is CAMRA's: both its Channel Islands branch guide and its national entry for the house say a tavern has stood on this site since that year, and no deed, licence or directory behind the date has been traced, which is why this is a C. Two other publishers reach the house. The Priaulx Library in St Peter Port has published a Guernsey woman's recollections of the 1860s, printed in the Evening Press in December
St Peter Port, Guernsey
The 1840 came to us from a single visitor's review of 2019, and a review is not something this site will stand a date on, so that citation has been dropped. Nothing we have been able to open states a founding year for the house. CAMRA's entry, surveyed in March 2015, describes a small locals' bar on Trinity Square and gives no date; it is absent from the branch's guide to real-ale houses because the same entry
Herm, Guernsey
Nobody publishes a founding date for this house, so the year on this page comes from a record rather than from the house, and no earlier mention of it has been traced. That record is a good one. The Priaulx Library prints a contemporary account of the night of 4 January 1952, when a wartime mine drifting off the coast exploded close in, the island's twenty-eight inhabitants were lucky to escape injury, and the
