Self-guided walk · Sydney
The Sydney historic pub walk is a self-guided route of 0.8 km between 3 old pubs, about 9 min walking, with a GPX file to follow. Fortune of War Hotel makes the oldest claim on it, 1828, and it holds the oldest record too, from 1830.
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© OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles © OpenStreetMap contributors · Places © GeoNames
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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.
The Rocks: Sydney’s oldest pubs. Three sandstone pubs on the spur between George Street and Walsh Bay, holding licences granted between 1830 and 1845. Two of them were built by tradesmen rather than brewers — a stonemason and a plasterer — and all three are on the New South Wales State Heritage Register. It is a short walk and an unusually steep one.
137 George Street, The Rocks NSW
Sydney's self-declared oldest pub stands on George Street in The Rocks, on a site licensed since about 1830. Tooth & Co. rebuilt it in 1921, and the hamper bar, high ceilings and dark timber survive from that era. A 2025 expansion added a bistro and boutique rooms upstairs, but the front bar keeps the old pub feel that once drew locals, sailors and soldiers.
480 m to stop 2 · about 6 min
81-83 Lower Fort Street, Millers Point, Sydney NSW 2000
A three-storey sandstone pub on the hill above Walsh Bay, built by stonemason George Paton in the 1840s and little altered since 1928. Log fires, hand-chiselled walls and weekend jazz set the mood. Below the bar lie stone cellars, star of the ghost tours and of a persistent legend about a smugglers' tunnel to the harbour.
310 m to stop 3 · about 4 min
19 Kent Street, Millers Point NSW
A handsome sandstone corner pub in Millers Point, built as a house around 1836 and licensed in the early 1840s. It claims to be Sydney's oldest continuously licensed hotel still in its original building. Restored in the 1980s using an 1852 photograph, it has brewed its own ales on site since 1986, so the beer you drink was made downstairs.
The photographs above are other people's work, used under open licences. Every photographer, licence and source page is named in the image credits.
This is a walk about masons rather than brewers. The New South Wales State Heritage Register has the emancipist Samuel Terry building a terrace of three on the George Street site of the Fortune of War, finished in the mid to late 1820s and put up as a public house, its footprint visible in Robert Russell’s survey of 1834. The builder George Payten raised the Garrison Church in 1842 and the Hero of Waterloo in 1843–44, the stone for both probably coming from the Kent Street quarries, the earliest worked in Sydney. The plasterer William Wells took a Crown grant in May 1836 and is believed to have lived in what is now the Lord Nelson until the licence was granted in the early 1840s.
Why so much of the district survives is a separate story, and the register tells part of it: when Millers Point was resumed during the plague of 1900, the Lord Nelson was one of only two hotels there kept by the Sydney Harbour Trust. It is also one of just three hotel buildings in the city in the Old Colonial Regency style, which is worth knowing before you look at the corner.
What the walk does not show is a straight line from licence to fabric. The oldest licence on the route belongs to the building most recently rebuilt, and the oldest walls on it carry a licence a dozen years younger. The national version of that argument is at Australia’s oldest pub, and the city’s pubs are listed at the oldest pubs in Sydney.
