No. 53 of the Top 100

Eight Bells

Church Street, Chipping Campden GL55 6JG

Grade C · TraditionTrading · checked Oct 2026

Eight Bells claims 1300. No earlier record has been found.

Claimed: 1300
First record: none found
Building: no single date

The building. Cotswold ashlar with a stone slate roof, C17, with one large and two small gables and a rear courtyard passage — we give it no single date because Historic England dates the building to the C17 without a year.

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How old is it, really?

How to read this ribbon

Hatched: 726 years claimed with no document found yet.

The claim

A honey-coloured stone inn on Church Street, with a passage through to a courtyard, an inglenook by the bay window and rooms upstairs. The kitchen is the main draw now and tables are worth booking, but the bar keeps cask beer and the walkers coming off the Cotswold Way are made welcome.

What the records show

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 been traced. The county record adds nothing either way: the Gloucestershire Historic Environment Record holds no entry for the inn at all, and the records it does keep in this part of Church Street are a watching brief at Mill Cottage in 2002, which found two post-medieval pits, and the town itself, whose weekly market was granted to the inhabitants of Campden by 1247 and held in the High Street. The passage through to the courtyard and the great hearth are genuine enough.

What to look for inside

Tradition that it lodged the masons of St James's church
Cotswold ashlar with mullioned windows and an inglenook
On the Cotswold Way through Chipping Campden

Visiting

Eight Bells is in Chipping Campden, England, at Church Street, Chipping Campden GL55 6JG. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

eightbellsinn.co.uk Directions in your maps app

Sources

Know something we don’t?Suggest a correctionLast checked Oct 2026

Run this pub? There is a badge for it

Free to put on your own site, no permission needed. It shows what the pub claims and what the records support, and it changes when the data does.

How to use it, and how to change what it says — if you have a document we have not seen, we would like to read it.

Above: the record · Below: what readers rememberThe record ends here

Raise a glass

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The snug

What people remember about Eight Bells

Nobody has written about this pub yet. These are readers’ own recollections, not our records — we check documents, not memories, and a memory never moves a date or a grade.

Were you a regular here?

We are after the things a record cannot hold: the landlord’s name, what was behind the bar, the room that is not there any more, the year the fire was moved. One paragraph is plenty.

The snug opens shortly. Until it does, send it to hello@oldpubs.com and we will put it on this page with your name on it.

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