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Cambridge’s oldest pubs / an Above Guide story
The pubs that outlasted everyone.
Dated from the archives rather than from the sign above the door—which is not always the same number.
01 / 06The River Inns
Before you start
Two pubs claim to be oldest. Both are right.
Pub ages conflate two different things: how long there has been a licensed house on a plot, and how long the building in front of you has actually been a pub. In Cambridge that produces a genuine tie.
The Pickerel has the longer continuous licence, conventionally dated to 1608—but its Magdalene Street frontage is early 19th century, with only the rear wing Tudor. The Green Dragon at Chesterton has the older building, a timber-framed range the Royal Commission dated to the 16th century. Each is honestly the oldest, and they are answering different questions.
1 of the six advertises a date its own record does not quite support. It is flagged on its card with what the sources actually show.
I
Built for the fair, not the colleges
The River Inns
1500–1599The oldest survivors stand on the water rather than in the town — timber-framed ranges at Chesterton and on Midsummer Common, built to lodge merchants travelling to Stourbridge Fair and to serve the ferries that crossed the Cam. Both were outside Cambridge when they were built.
02 pubsII
The inn becomes a matter of record
The Licensed House
1600–1699The century in which a pub’s age stops being tradition and starts being documented — a licence, a college lease, a name in an archive. Cambridge’s longest continuous licence dates from here, and the Eagle turns from a Tudor inn into a working coaching house.
02 pubsIII
Up the hill and over the bridge
The Georgian Town
1700–todayThe last of the six open away from the old centre — on Castle Hill where Roman and Norman Cambridge began, and on Bridge Street, the road north out of the town. Both date from the 1740s, and both outlived the river trade the railway later took away.
02 pubs1550—last orders
Six houses, and what is provable.
Dates checked against the Royal Commission’s Survey of Cambridge (1959) via Capturing Cambridge, Historic England listings, Corpus Christi College’s archive for the Eagle, and local pub history. Verified 29 July 2026.
Six is where the record lands. Cambridge lost most of its medieval inns to conversion and redevelopment, so beyond these the archive thins out—and padding the list would mean inventing depth that is not there.