The Bear Inn

The oldest name in Oxford drinking, in a room so small the ceiling is the exhibit — thousands of club ties, clipped from their owners in exchange for a pint.

The Bear carries the oldest pub name in Oxford, and the documentation is real: on 28 April 1241 Lady Christina Pady left the site to St Frideswide’s Priory. It was Le Tabard by 1432 and The Bear Inn by 1457. The complication — which the sign outside does not mention — is that the inn those records describe stood on the High Street and closed in 1801, when it had over thirty bedrooms and stabling for thirty horses. The building you drink in is the ostler’s house from that coaching inn, put up in the early 17th century on the corner of Alfred Street and Blue Boar Street. It is tiny, low-beamed, and seats about two dozen inside. The ceilings and walls carry more than 4,500 snippets of club ties, a collection begun in 1952 by the landlord Alan Course, who cut them from drinkers with a pair of scissors in return for half a pint. It later turned up as a plot device in Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse.