The Milk House, Sissinghurst

The Milk House

The Street, Sissinghurst, Cranbrook TN17 2JG

Grade B · Building datedTrading · checked Oct 2026

The Milk House is dated 1500 by its listing. The records say 1828.

Claimed

1500

First record

1828

Building

c.1500

The building. Hall house of the early 16th century, refronted in the 18th and rendered in the 19th and 20th; large stone fireplace with a Tudor-arched surround, late 16th century.

Real ale

Food

Rooms

Fireplaces

Village

The claim

A hall house of the early sixteenth century on The Street at Sissinghurst, refronted in the eighteenth and rendered since, keeping a late sixteenth-century stone fireplace under a Tudor arch. Historic England lists it as the Bull Public House, the name it traded under until 2013, when it reopened as the Milk House; Milkhouse Street was the village’s own older name. The first record of drink here is a directory entry of 1828.

What the records show

The sixteenth century here is Historic England's, and it sits on the register under the name the house traded under until 2013. The Milk House is the former Bull, and list entry 1084810 — The Bull Public House, The Street, Grade II since 19 May 1986 — describes a hall house, now a public house, of the early sixteenth century, refronted in the eighteenth and rendered in the nineteenth and twentieth, with the frame substantially intact, moulded beams in the ground-floor room to the right and a large stone fireplace under a Tudor-arched surround of the late sixteenth century. Kent's record of historic buildings carries the same text, as monument TQ 73 NE 123, and adds nothing to it: no earlier dating and no mention of drink. The house claims nothing itself. Its own site calls it a former coaching inn and prints no year, and CAMRA's Maidstone and Mid Kent branch, which surveyed it on 11 February 2024, reports the renaming and a Tudor fireplace without a date of founding. So the early sixteenth century dates the building and not the trade, and the drinking is recorded three centuries later. Dover Kent Archives, which collects the licensees and the newspaper notices for Kent houses, opens its list with John Dann at the Bull in Milkhouse Street in Pigot's Directory of 1828-29; the Kent Herald of 7 February 1828 names him there as well, and inquests were held at the Bull Inn in 1845 and 1869. Nothing traced records drink on these premises before 1828, which is why the sixteenth century is recorded here as the age of the building rather than the age of the pub. The fourteenth century the same archive mentions — the Bull is reputedly a fourteenth-century building with a priest's hole — is told there as report, and the listing's early sixteenth century is two hundred years against it. Drink without a meal is not in question: the house opens at nine in the morning and the kitchen from noon, the bar pours local cask ale, draught beer and cider, and CAMRA records one regular beer and one changing. Trading rests on that survey and on the Food Standards Agency, which inspected the kitchen on 6 March 2025, rated it five and holds the business as a pub or bar. What would move the dating is an earlier record of drink, which means the Cranbrook alehouse recognizances and quarter sessions licensing papers at the Kent History and Library Centre, not published online.

Dated evidence for The Milk House, earliest first
Year	What	Source
1500	Claimed founding	Its listing
c.1500	Present building	Historic England listing
1828	First record of a drinking house here	Dover Kent Archives, on Pigot's Directory of 1828-29

What to look for inside

On the register as the Bull Public House, the name it carried until 2013
Late 16th-century stone fireplace with a Tudor-arched surround
Sissinghurst was called Milkhouse Street until the 1850s

Visiting

The Milk House is in Sissinghurst, England, at The Street, Sissinghurst, Cranbrook TN17 2JG. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

themilkhouse.co.uk Directions in your maps app