The claim
A convict-era brick hotel on Windsor's Thompson Square, opened at Governor Macquarie's urging in 1815 and billed as the oldest pub on the Australian mainland. Georgian doorways, cedar joinery, a circular staircase and flagged cellars survive from the colonial fit-out. The building spent decades as an officers' mess and a home before returning to pub life, and now has a bistro.
What the records show
The State Heritage Register quotes the notice that opened the house: a large and commodious building lately completed at considerable expense in the town of Windsor for an inn, called the Macquarie Arms and kept by Thomas Ranson, 'who formerly was an Innkeeper in England', to open for the public on Monday 31 July 1815. Hawkesbury People & Places, a local history site for the district, cites the same notice from the Sydney Gazette of 15 July 1815, which dates the announcement a fortnight before the opening, and names Ranson as the innkeeper. Governor Macquarie's diary records the condition he attached to the land: the emancipist Richard Fitzgerald, who had arrived as a convict in 1791, was given a large allotment in the square on the express condition that he build at once a handsome commodious inn of brick or stone, at least two storeys high. The Hawkesbury site has Fitzgerald arriving on the William and Ann in 1791, holding government posts including superintendent of convicts and works at Windsor, and building a cottage for his family next door, and it describes the house as two-storeyed brick with a cellar and attic rooms, much of its cedar joinery, its staircases and its colonial fanlights still in place. The building has survived and the trade has not. Army officers stationed at Windsor took it over in the late 1830s and it was the Mess House on Armstrong's map of 1842; the Hawkesbury site has it as a private home from 1840 to 1872, then the Bushell family running it as the Royal Hotel from 1872 to 1900, and it prints an advertisement from the Windsor and Richmond Gazette of 31 August 1901 for Bloome's Royal Hotel, Windsor, which carries the licensed trade past 1900 under a landlord neither publisher had named. It has been a hotel since. It is also known as the Royal Hotel. On the garden wall facing the square is a plaque marking the flood of 1867 at 19.3 metres, on brickwork thought to be made of bricks rejected from St Matthew's church in 1817.
| Year | What | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 1815 | Claimed founding | The pub |
| c.1815 | Present building | Building fabric |
| 1815 | First record of a drinking house here | NSW State Heritage Register |
What to look for inside
- Built at Governor Lachlan Macquarie's instruction
- Officers' mess of the 50th Regiment in the late 1830s
- Traded as the Royal Hotel 1874-1960
- Stone-flagged cellars and circular cedar staircase
Visiting
Macquarie Arms Hotel is in Windsor, Australia, at 99 George Street (Thompson Square), Windsor NSW. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.
Sources
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macquarie_Arms_Hotel
- timegents.com/2017/01/23/macquarie-arms-hotel-windsor/
- macquariearms.com.au/
- www.australiantraveller.com/australia/oldest-pubs-in-australia/
- apps.environment.nsw.gov.au/dpcheritageapp/ViewHeritageItemDetails.aspx?ID=5045146
- www.hawkesbury.org/name/macquarie-arms-hotel.html
Know something we don’t?Suggest a correctionLast checked Sept 2026
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