Cream-painted brick inn with two tall chimneys and a lamp over the door, benches outside

Spaniards Inn

Spaniards Road, Hampstead, London NW3 7JJ

Grade C · TraditionTrading · checked Sept 2026

Spaniards Inn is dated 1585 by CAMRA. No earlier record has been found.

Claimed: 1585
First record: none found
Building: no single date

The building. Seventeenth-century brick with some timber framing and weatherboarding in the national register's reading, three storeys under an M-shaped tiled roof partly hidden behind a parapet, with painted panelling inside that may be original; the 1585 is traditional — we give it no single date because the prose opens "Traditionally 1585"; the fabric is 17th century onward.

Pub website Directions

Real ale
Food
Beer garden
Dog friendly

How old is it, really?

How to read this ribbon

Hatched: 441 years claimed with no document found yet.

The claim

Where Spaniards Road squeezes past an old tollhouse on the edge of Hampstead Heath stands this white weatherboarded inn, traditionally dated to 1585. Its rooms are low, beamed and panelled, and the big garden is a Heath-walker's reward. Dickens and Bram Stoker both wrote it into their novels, and Keats is said to have lingered here.

What the records show

The 1585 is CAMRA's, and CAMRA hedges it: the building dates back to about 1585, it says, though possibly not originally as a pub. The pub's own website gives no date. No published document supports the year, and the inn's documented history — the Gordon Riots of 1780, the 18th-century tollhouse opposite — is from the 18th century onward.

What to look for inside

Mentioned in The Pickwick Papers and Dracula
Landlord said to have delayed Gordon Rioters heading for Kenwood in 1780
Dick Turpin legends (his birth here is a myth)
Old tollhouse narrows the road outside

Visiting

Spaniards Inn is in London, England, at Spaniards Road, Hampstead, London NW3 7JJ. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

thespaniardshampstead.co.uk Directions in your maps app

Sources

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

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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.

Other old pubs near London

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