Canterbury historic pub walk

The missing house stood at 16 St Margaret’s Street. The Royal Fountain traded on a story reaching back to 1029 — Earl Godwin’s wife lodging there, Becket’s four knights meeting in the house before the murder — and that 1029 was already being set in print as fact in 1907. A German raid on 1 June 1942 destroyed the building, the licence went out to the Abbot’s Barton Hotel, and the frontage now holds an entrance to a shopping arcade.

Ye Olde Beverlie begins the walk on St Stephen’s Green, and the 1570 it is dated to is not its own year. CAMRA credits the house to Sir Roger Manwood, who built it along with the almshouses beside it, and Historic England lists inn and almshouses as one group, saying the inn is said to be of the same date as the almshouses. The listing then narrows the claim: the only fabric of that period visible from outside is the crow-stepped gable in the west front, and the front itself is eighteenth-century. Use as an inn is recorded from 1740, when the house was known as the Hospital. This is the only grade B on the walk.

The Parrot is here for its carpentry and not for its age as a pub. It has only been one since 1987, which keeps it out of our ranking altogether, and that is worth saying plainly rather than quietly. What it fills is St Radigund’s Hall, and even the hall is argued over: a regional heritage account dates it to about 1370, while the Canterbury Historical and Archaeological Society, which cites the studies behind its notes, reads it as fifteenth-century and says virtually nothing of its early history is known. The society follows the building instead — tenements by the early twentieth century, saved from demolition in 1937, then a girls’ club, an annexe to the art college and a burger bar.

Out at Westbere, Ye Olde Yew Tree Inn gives 1348, the plague year, which is the kind of date that gets repeated. Historic England reads the easternmost part of the building as probably fifteenth-century and describes what a walker can stand and look at: a moulded dragon post at the corner, diagonal braces at ground level, a jettied window bay and an original arched doorcase. It says nothing about drinking. Neither does the county history — Edward Hasted’s survey of Kent, volume nine of 1800, spends seven pages on the parish and names no inn, alehouse or tavern in it. A blank is not a denial, and it is not evidence for 1348 either.

Two of these three signs open with “Ye Olde”, which means no more than “the old”: what “Ye Olde” actually means. The county’s claimants are ranked at the oldest pubs in Kent, and how an old building is told from an old drinking house is set out in the methodology.