The Chequers

One of the easiest historic pubs in Oxford to walk straight past — a tall, narrow courtyard building reached down an alley off the High Street.

The Chequers is reached down a passage so narrow most people on the High Street never notice it. That is a good part of its character: a tall, galleried building set back in its own yard, invisible from the street it belongs to. In the fifteenth century the building was a private house occupied by a moneylender, and that is where the name comes from — the chequerboard was the money-changer’s sign, from the checked cloth used for counting. Much of the interior dates from the 1500s, when the tenement was rebuilt as a tavern. It has been an inn ever since, appearing in the 1772 survey of Oxford taken after the Mileways Act and advertised for auction in Jackson’s Oxford Journal in 1786. The stained glass, dark panelling and the yard are the reasons to come.