News of the closure of Ye Olde Fighting Cocks in St Albans has ricocheted around the world, the imminent shuttering of “England’s oldest pub” devastating patrons from America to Australia. Such has been the outpouring over an institution dating back to 793AD that the landlord, forced into administration by the Covid downturn, now hopes to have found a buyer to keep it open after all. 

Equally overegged may be that title – the oldest pub in England – which Guinness World Records, in fact, retired 22 years ago. The St Albans outpost did once hold it, Guinness says, but they have “never been able to state definitively which [pub] was the oldest”. Will Britain’s inaugural boozer please stand up?

“The Trip! The Trip on the Rock!” proclaims Michael Colton, a former member of the Campaign for Real Ale. He is certain that Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, to give it its proper name – the Nottingham landmark resting against Castle Rock, on which the walls of the city’s castle are built – deserves the title. Certainly, “established in 1189” looms in large black letters on its white walls.

But we are five minutes up the road at the Bell Inn – “Nottingham’s Oldest Inn”, if you believe the frontage – and closer still is Ye Olde Salutation Inn (“the Sal”), which, you guessed it, makes the very same claim. 

The accolade is so fiercely squabbled over in this half-kilometre radius that Time Team’s diggers turned up 25 years ago to put the matter to bed – deciding inconclusively that the Trip was attached to the oldest caves, the Sal the oldest building, and that the Bell Inn was the site of the oldest pub.