3 pubs checked · updated 18 September 2026
The short answer
By claim the earliest South African date on this list is 1808, at the Perseverance Tavern on Buitenkant Street in Cape Town, founded by Johannes Blesser on the Cape Town Museum's account as reported through Wikipedia. By record it is the same house at a later year: secondary accounts put its first formal wine-and-malt licence at 1836. The Pig and Whistle at Bathurst calls itself the country's oldest continuously licensed pub on a date of 1832, and no licence has been read for it.
South African dates run through licences, and the licence is usually the only thing anybody can point at. Cape Town called itself the Tavern of the Seas because its business was refreshing ships, so a Buitenkant Street house within a short walk of where passengers came ashore is exactly where an early tavern would be, and 1836 — the year a wine-and-malt licence is said to have been issued to it — carries far more weight here than the 1808 the house prefers. In the Eastern Cape the origin is different. The 1820 Settlers were landed on that coast by the British government, and one of them, a Nottinghamshire blacksmith named Thomas Hartley, built a forge, a house and then an inn beside them at Bathurst, which is how a village there has an English inn sign and English beams. The third house is a twentieth-century Johannesburg room that began as a tea room in 1929 and took a malt and liquor licence about 1942, and its real significance is not its age: during apartheid it served Black customers quietly in a whites-only suburb. What is missing across all three is a register. The national heritage agency protects the Bathurst building; nobody has traced an entry for the Cape Town one, although it is widely described as listed, and South Africa publishes no searchable liquor register at all, which is why two of these three years rest on what other people have written.
Perseverance Tavern stands on Buitenkant Street in Gardens, opposite the Iziko Rust en Vreugd, and has collected more stories than documents: a bar counter said to be built from old wine casks, a vine in the garden said to have been the country’s oldest until the 1990s, Cecil John Rhodes rumoured among the regulars, and the first South African Pub of the Year award, won in 1985 against a hundred and seventy rivals. Ohlsson’s Breweries, the forerunner of South African Breweries, owned it; the accounts disagree about whether they sold in 1952 or 1956, and this site names the company and leaves the year open. It shut in the alcohol ban of July 2020 and reopened under new owners in February 2021. Pig and Whistle Inn is the Eastern Cape one, a long low house on the Kowie Road that traded as the Bathurst Inn and then as Widow Hartley’s before airmen from a wartime flying school gave it the name over the door now; Thomas Baines is said to have painted it in oils in 1849. The Radium Beerhall is on Louis Botha Avenue in Orange Grove, with a counter rescued from the Ferreirasdorp Hotel and a band most weeks.
Every one of these houses is better documented for what happened in it than for when it began. The Radium is the clearest case: the 1929 dates a tea room kept by the Kalil family, the liquor licence follows about 1942, and the thing worth knowing about the place — that it served Black drinkers in a suburb where that was not meant to happen — is a matter of living memory rather than of paperwork. At Bathurst the building is protected and the trade is not: the heritage agency lists the structure, and the years for the forge, the house and the inn all come from the inn’s own history. At the Cape the strongest year, 1836, is the one the house does not lead with. That pattern — a licence beating a founding legend — is the ordinary result of the tests set out in how historians date an old pub, and the grades that follow from it are explained in the methodology.
The sign at Bathurst is worth a paragraph of its own, because it is the clearest surviving trace of who built the village. Hartley came out with the 1820 Settlers, and the inn he raised beside his forge carried a plain English trade name until the Second World War replaced it with airmen’s slang. Pig and Whistle is one of the names people most often invent etymologies for, and what those names usually mean is set out in pub sign meanings.
Three houses across three provinces is a sketch. Grahamstown, Port Elizabeth, Durban, Stellenbosch and the wine districts are unworked here, the Cape archives have not been read, and no closed house has been recorded for the archive at all. For the nearest comparison — a settler country where colonial licensing registers survive and make the dating much firmer — see the oldest pubs in Australia and New Zealand. The full international ranking is at the top 100 oldest pubs.
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Cape Town, Western Cape
The founding in 1808 by Johannes Blesser comes from the Cape Town Museum by way of Wikipedia, and secondary sources put the first formal wine-and-malt licence at 1836. The building stands opposite the Iziko Rust en Vreugd and is described as heritage-listed, though no register entry has been traced. Ohlsson's Breweries, the forerunner of South African Breweries, owned the pub — until 1952 by one account and 1956 by
Bathurst, Eastern Cape
The inn calls itself the oldest continuously licensed pub in South Africa, and its own history is the fullest account traced: Thomas Hartley, a blacksmith from Nottinghamshire, came out with the 1820 settlers, built a forge and a house in Bathurst in the early 1820s, and by 1832 had opened an inn beside the forge. A second and independent account disagrees with that year and with part of the story. The architectural
Johannesburg, Gauteng
The 1929 is the local press's, and it dates a tea room: ShowMe says the Radium was established in 1929, and Wikipedia has the Kalil family's tea room taking a malt and liquor licence about 1942. It calls itself Johannesburg's oldest surviving bar and grill. We could not reach a working website for it in September 2026, but ShowMe reported in February 2025 that its doors remain open, answering the closure rumours
The photographs above are other people's work, used under an open licence. Every photographer, licence and source page is named in the image credits. A pub with no licensed photograph shows an illustrated façade instead.
