Self-guided walk · Nottingham
The Nottingham historic pub walk is a self-guided route of 0.7 km between 3 old pubs, about 9 min walking, with a GPX file to follow. Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem makes the oldest claim on it, 1189; the oldest record on the walk belongs to The Bell Inn, from 1638.
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Distances are walking estimates, 1.3 × the straight line at 5 km/h. These are history walks, not a drinking challenge: take it slowly, drink water between stops, and leave a pub out if the day is getting long.
Nottingham’s three-way oldest pub dispute. Three houses stand within a few minutes of one another between Castle Rock and the Old Market Square, and all three have been called the oldest pub in Nottingham. The walk is short enough for a lunch hour. What makes it worth doing in one go is not who wins but how differently each of the three makes its case.
1 Brewhouse Yard, Nottingham NG1 6AD
Wedged against the sandstone cliff beneath Nottingham Castle, the Trip is England's most famous claimant to the title of oldest inn. Its back rooms are carved straight into the rock, where caves once served the castle as a brewhouse. The 1189 crusader story is romance rather than record, but the atmosphere of smoke-darkened caverns and creaking panelling is entirely genuine.
420 m to stop 2 · about 5 min
Hounds Gate, Maid Marian Way, Nottingham NG1 7AA
A timber-framed survivor marooned beside the ring road, the Sal is Nottingham's rock-and-real-ale pub and a third contender in the city's oldest-pub argument. Beneath the bar lie two levels of sandstone caves with a deep well shaft, shown to visitors when staff allow. Its 1240 date is legend, but the medieval timbers overhead are real.
290 m to stop 3 · about 4 min
18 Angel Row, Old Market Square, Nottingham NG1 6HL
Hidden behind a modest Georgian front on the Old Market Square, the Bell conceals a tree-ring-dated medieval timber frame and deep sandstone cellars with a well. It is the Nottingham contender with the best-dated fabric, even if its tavern paperwork starts later. Expect beamed bars on several floors, cask ale and a busy city-centre crowd.
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The argument here is conducted on the buildings, and each of the three does it differently. At Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem the claim is painted on the building and repeated by its operator, and the rooms behind the bar are cut into the sandstone of Castle Rock, which makes the case feel settled before you have read a word of it. Historic England traces the first reference to a pub on that site to 1751 and the “oldest inn” signage to about 1910.
A few minutes away, Ye Olde Salutation Inn makes the same kind of claim in the same way — a date on the front of a jettied timber range — and has the better timbers to go with it, reported at about 1360 by tree-ring work. It also has the worst site of the three, hemmed in by the ring road with traffic on two sides.
The Bell Inn does the opposite. From the Old Market Square it is a modest Georgian front among shopfronts, and everything it has to offer is indoors and upwards: substantial framing, stop-chamfered ceiling beams and the crown post roofs the listing describes, over rock-hewn cellars with a well. We set the three of them against each other in which is Nottingham’s oldest pub, and the city’s other claimants are on the oldest pubs in Nottingham.
