The claim
Down a narrow court off Fleet Street, the Cheshire Cheese is a dim, fire-lit maze of panelled rooms and vaulted cellars rebuilt after the Great Fire. The 1538 claim is unproven — the listing dates the house to the late seventeenth century — but it was certainly trading by 1680. Its literary regulars are legendary, and a famous swearing parrot, Polly, entertained drinkers for some forty years.
What the records show
The claim is the pub's own: its about page says a pub has stood here since 1538 and that the medieval house was rebuilt in about 1667 after the Great Fire. Historic England finds no evidence for 1538; the earliest reference to the Cheshire Cheese is a broadside ballad published in 1680, consistent with rebuilding after the fire. The statutory list entry, read on 17 September 2026, puts a date on the fabric for the first time on this page. Entry 1064662, grade II, first listed on 4 January 1950 as No 145 Fleet Street, calls the house late seventeenth-century and very much altered: a yellow brick front to Fleet Street probably of the later eighteenth century, remodelled and heightened in the nineteenth, four storeys and dormers over a shop, with a longer elevation of apparently mid- to later eighteenth-century brickwork down Wine Office Court. The oldest thing it names is the late seventeenth-century vaulted cellar beneath the small courtyard, which is where the pub's own remark that the cellars may be older finds its only support. Nothing in the entry reaches 1538.
| Year | What | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 1538 | Claimed founding | The pub |
| c.1667 | Present building | Building fabric |
| 1680 | First record of a drinking house here | Historic England, on the broadside ballad of 1680 |
What to look for inside
- Earliest reference is a 1680 broadside ballad
- Associated with Dickens, Chesterton, Twain and Wodehouse
- Polly the parrot, who died in 1926
- CAMRA three-star historic interior
Visiting
Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese is in London, England, at 145 Fleet Street (Wine Office Court), London EC4A 2BU. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.
Sources
- heritagecalling.com/2025/09/25/what-is-the-oldest-historic-pub-in-london/
- camra.org.uk/pubs/olde-cheshire-cheese-london-156637
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_Olde_Cheshire_Cheese
- www.ye-olde-cheshire-cheese.co.uk/about
- historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1064662
- ratings.food.gov.uk/business/293911
Then and now
Photographed about 1955, and today. The doorway in Wine Office Court, 1955.
Photo: Willy Pragher · licenceKnow something we don’t?Suggest a correctionLast checked Sept 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.
