Timber-framed inn hung with ivy on a cobbled street, with leaded windows and a mermaid sign

Photo: Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK · licence

The Mermaid Inn

Mermaid Street, Rye TN31 7EY

Grade C · TraditionTrading · checked Sept 2026

The Mermaid Inn claims 1156. The records say 1670.

Claimed: 1156
First record: 1670
Building: c.1420

The building. Rebuilt 1420 with 16th-century additions; vaulted cellars assessed by Pevsner as 13th century.

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Haunted
Smuggling
Real ale
Food
Rooms
Beer garden

How old is it, really?

How to read this ribbon

Hatched: 514 years the pub claims but no document confirms. Solid: 356 years on record. Diamond: the standing building, dated from its fabric to about 1420.

The claim

Halfway up cobbled Mermaid Street, this timber-framed house is one of the great sights of Rye. Rebuilt about 1420 over older vaulted cellars, it was a haunt of the Hawkhurst smuggling gang in the 1730s and 1740s, then stopped being an inn about 1770 and spent a century as a private house and as lodgings. It was not allowed a bar until 1955. Guests drink by the Giant's Fireplace, dine in the restaurant or sleep in a four-poster room.

What the records show

The 1156 belongs to the cellars, and both Pevsner and the national register place those in the thirteenth century; the timber frame is a rebuilding of about 1420. What the records settle here is not the beginning but the break. William Holloway's history of Rye, printed in 1847 from the town's own papers, prints the king's bailiff's schedule of rents of assize for 1670, where the heaviest rent in Middle Street ward - five shillings a year - falls on the tenements, stable, close and garden of the heirs of William Gostrey, called the Mermaide, late of Thomas Higgins, jurat, some time of William Didsbury, jurat, and before Pedell's, abutting to the King's street called the Middle street. Earlier, Thomas Peacock's will of 1638 settled four pounds a year on Rye's free school out of a tenement or messuage in Middle Street called the Mermaid. Neither paper uses the word inn; that is Holloway's reading. A trade token carries the house too: Boyne and Williamson record a Rye farthing reading Michell Cadman at the Mearemade, which is a landlord's token, though it bears no year and so fixes none. Peacock's four pounds was redeemed in 1758 for fifty, and that is the last dated document naming the house as an inn. Then the break. Holloway, at page 601, writes that the Mermaid “only ceased to be an inn about eighty years ago”, and gives its proprietor in 1847 as Mr Charles Poile, keeping the carved wainscot in a private house. Boyne and Williamson, publishing the token in 1889, say there is then no Mermaid Inn and that it ceased to be one about 1770. Louis Jennings went hunting for it in Rye in the 1870s: the sexton had never heard of it, an old man told him the inn had long been closed, and the house he was shown had a labourer's family in the rooms and a widow keeping the great upstairs chamber with its Dutch tiles. Rye Castle Museum reads the 1891 census as lodgings and the 1901 census as an inn again. CAMRA's national inventory records that the house was not allowed to install a bar until 1955 and that the counter of overlapping planks probably dates from then. So the drinking here is not continuous, and it is continuous drinking that the ranking measures. The house keeps its page, its pins and its dates, and stands outside the hundred.

Dated evidence for The Mermaid Inn, earliest first
Year	What	Source
1156	Claimed founding	The pub
c.1420	Present building	Pevsner
1670	First record of a drinking house here	William Holloway's history of Rye, 1847

What to look for inside

Haunt of the Hawkhurst Gang smugglers in the 1730s-40s
Giant's Fireplace and carved Tudor woodwork
Featured on television's Most Haunted
CAMRA one-star historic interior

Visiting

The Mermaid Inn is in Rye, England, at Mermaid Street, Rye TN31 7EY. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

mermaidinn.com Directions in your maps app

Sources

Cobbled Mermaid Street in 1955, empty of cars, with the timber-framed front of the Mermaid Inn on the right — Then and now
Photographed about 1955, and today. Mermaid Street in 1955, a ladder against the house opposite.
Every pub we have a pair for

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

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At a glance

Type: Inn
Listed: Grade II* listed
Operator: Independent (privately owned)
Evidence: Grade C · Tradition
Features: Haunted · Smuggling · Real ale · Food · Rooms
Rank in England: No. 16 by claim
Not in the Top 100: Old building, younger pub: the Mermaid stopped being an inn about 1770 and spent the nineteenth century as a private house and then as lodgings. It took guests again by the 1901 census, was a private club from 1913, and was not allowed a bar until 1955.

Coastlines: Natural Earth · Pub locations ©OpenStreetMap contributorsNatural Earth · ©OpenStreetMap contributors

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What people remember about the Mermaid Inn

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