Ye Olde Starre Inne

40 Stonegate, York YO1 8AS

Grade A · DocumentedTrading · checked Oct 2026

Ye Olde Starre Inne claims 1644. The records go back further, to 1581.

Claimed: 1644
First record: 1581
Building: no single date

The building. Timber-framed core a two-bay range of 16th-century date; a second, slightly lower framed range of the late 16th or early 17th century; a red-brick wing of the early 18th century; a further wing added late in the 19th century, refitted about 1890 and renovated again in 1985 — we give it no single date because The house has no single year. York's record of historic buildings dates the timber core to the sixteenth century without naming a year, and the brick wing and the room behind it are a century and two centuries later..

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Historic interior
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How old is it, really?

How to read this ribbon

Solid: 445 years on record.

The claim

Reached by a passage off Stonegate, behind the shopfronts, Ye Olde Starre Inne has a sign slung across the street on a beam first put up in 1733. Greene King runs it and calls it York's oldest licensed inn. The city's own record of historic buildings dates the timber core to the sixteenth century and prints a study of the house as an inn in about 1581, from the inventory of its keeper William Carter.

What the records show

The paper here is older than the sign. Greene King, which runs the house, says on its page that the pub was first built in 1644 and is believed to be the oldest in York, and in March 2026 it applied for permission to letter the street sign "York's oldest licensed inn". The 1644 is a licence year, not a building year, and York's own record of historic buildings says so twice over: the Royal Commission's 1981 survey of the central area dates the timber core to a two-bay range of the sixteenth century, with a second framed range of the late sixteenth or early seventeenth, a red-brick wing of the early eighteenth and a further room added late in the nineteenth. The same record carries the earlier evidence of drinking. It quotes Lisa Liddy's 2015 study of domestic objects in York, which takes the Starre Inne on Stonegate at about 1581 as its case study and works from the will and inventory of its keeper William Carter, describing a large, well-stocked inn with glazed windows, wainscot panelling and private dining rooms. An inn trading on these premises sixty-three years before the year the house claims is the strongest kind of support a claim can have, which is why this is graded A rather than B. T. P. Cooper, writing in 1897, said the inn was reputed to go back to the reign of Henry VIII, and nothing traced carries that. The house is listed Grade II. The city council's food register has it at 40 Stonegate, inspected on 2 October 2025, and Greene King publishes hours of eleven to eleven.

Dated evidence for Ye Olde Starre Inne, earliest first
Year	What	Source
1644	Claimed founding	The pub
1581	First record of a drinking house here	York's record of historic buildings, quoting Lisa Liddy's 2015 study

What to look for inside

Studied as an inn at about 1581 from the inventory of William Carter
Sign hung across Stonegate since 1733
Stained glass bar screen by J. W. Knowles of York, about 1890

Visiting

Ye Olde Starre Inne is in York, England, at 40 Stonegate, York YO1 8AS. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

greeneking.co.uk Directions in your maps app

Sources

Know something we don’t?Suggest a correctionLast checked Oct 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.

Above: the record · Below: what readers rememberThe record ends here

Raise a glass

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One per person. It is a show of hands, not evidence.

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The snug

What people remember about Ye Olde Starre Inne

Nobody has written about this pub yet. These are readers’ own recollections, not our records — we check documents, not memories, and a memory never moves a date or a grade.

Were you a regular here?

We are after the things a record cannot hold: the landlord’s name, what was behind the bar, the room that is not there any more, the year the fire was moved. One paragraph is plenty.

The snug opens shortly. Until it does, send it to hello@oldpubs.com and we will put it on this page with your name on it.

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