Which is the oldest pub in the Ironbridge Gorge?

The Golden Ball takes the top spot.

Established in 1728, it is recognised as Ironbridge's oldest recorded licensed public house.

That means people were drinking here 53 years before the Iron Bridge opened.

Think about that for a moment.

There wasn't yet a town called Ironbridge. There were no coachloads of visitors arriving to admire the world's first great cast-iron bridge. The Gorge was a landscape of mines, woods, quarries, furnaces and small communities.

Then came the extraordinary industrial expansion that changed the valley and ultimately changed the world.

The Golden Ball watched it happen.

It retains the sort of details that can't easily be recreated: low ceilings, exposed beams, small interconnected rooms and reminders of its brewing past, including old ovens, vats and a water pump.

The landlords

Hanging in the pub is a list of its landlords, and it reads like a slow roll-call of the town itself. After the licence of 1728 the record picks up with Brook and Elizabeth Cox from 1828 to 1833, then falls silent for six years before John Wilcox takes over from 1840 to 1856. Another gap follows, broken briefly by Thomas Instone in 1868 and 1869.

Then come the Baileys, who kept the place for the best part of a century between them: Thomas and Marget from 1876 to 1901, George and Jemima from 1909 to 1949, and Tom for a year or two after that. William Waltho followed from 1952 to 1970, and Derek Ashdown from 1973 to 1986.

The turnover quickens as it nears our own time: Dorothy Rowney, Miles Taylor, Glen Conway and Trevor Roberts, David Heery through the 1990s, Mathew Rowland, then Kevin Price from 2005 to 2013 and Helen Pickerill from 2013 to 2023. The list has been amended by hand at the bottom, as such lists always are, to bring it up to the present.

The blanks matter as much as the names. Where the board says “no record”, it is being honest about what has simply not survived.

Name and early years

Local tradition says the earliest recorded landladies ran the Golden Ball as a brothel. It was well known that the pubs in the area served the miners and the men working on the boats.

The building itself is said to date from the mid to late 1600s, though no one has ever been able to confirm that.

Before it became a pub, the building is believed to have been a silk merchant's house. A silk merchant's emblem was a golden ball, which is where the pub is said to have taken its name.

And perhaps its greatest historical achievement is simply this: it survived.

Industry boomed and declined. Roads changed. Buildings vanished. Dozens of pubs closed.

The Golden Ball kept serving beer.

Nearly 300 years later, it is still doing precisely that.

The Malthouse is one of the most fascinating entries because its history is hidden behind its present name.

The building itself contains fabric much older than our 1752 working pub date, including a 16th-century timber frame subsequently hidden behind later brickwork.

For generations this was the Talbot Inn.

And the Talbot wasn't merely serving anonymous travellers.

In 1804, pioneering Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick gave his address as the Talbot Inn, Coalbrookdale, while visiting Ironbridge.

Some local memory has placed him at the White Hart instead, but the strongest evidence we have is Trevithick's own instruction to write to him at the Talbot.

Local tradition also connects the inn with figures including Thomas Telford and John Wilkinson.

Those stories are plausible, given the Talbot's position and importance, but at present we're treating them as tradition rather than documented fact.

A customer who “fell down like a log of wood”

Newspaper court reports give us a rather different view of life at the Talbot.

One records farmer Ernest Ralphs of Buildwas being accused of drunkenness.

Witnesses claimed he was very drunk, got up, staggered and: “fell down like a log of wood.”

Ralphs denied it. Other witnesses backed him. The case was dismissed.

Another landlord was less fortunate. James Toddington was prosecuted for permitting drunkenness and fined £1 plus 9 shillings costs. His licence was endorsed.

And beer wasn't simply consumed here. It was brewed here too.

Suddenly the modern name, The Malthouse, feels rather appropriate.

The White Hart takes us back to the riverside immediately before the Iron Bridge transformed the settlement.

Our working date is 1771.

Its Grade II listed building belongs to the 18th-century Wharfage that developed around river traffic, industry and eventually the extraordinary influx of visitors attracted by the new bridge.

Even the name carries history.

The white hart, a white stag, was the personal emblem of Richard II and became one of Britain's oldest and most familiar inn signs.

The buildings surrounding the White Hart changed enormously during the following two centuries.

Some neighbouring inns disappeared altogether.

The White Hart didn't.

Today it remains a pub with rooms beside the Severn, still fulfilling essentially the same purpose as generations before.

The Swan sits right on the Wharfage and belongs to the great period of change immediately following construction of the Iron Bridge.

The building has 18th-century origins and began life connected with the malting trade before becoming an inn serving the growing riverside community.

Merchants, ironmasters, labourers and travellers all moved along this stretch.

Local tradition even connects the Swan with meetings associated with the Iron Bridge itself.

Again, we're treating that as tradition unless documentary evidence turns up.

But that is exactly why we're doing this research.

One old document can completely alter the story of a pub.

The Woodbridge has a bridge story of its own.

Our working date is 1785, when an inn developed beside the wooden bridge crossing the Severn here.

That bridge didn't last.

The catastrophic 1795 flood destroyed it.

In 1818 it was replaced by the beautiful single-span iron bridge beside the pub today.

Which gives us a lovely bit of Gorge symmetry.

Upstream, the Tontine grew up facing the famous Iron Bridge.

Downstream, the Woodbridge developed beside another historic Severn crossing.

Even the name sets this pub apart.

The All Nations opened in 1789 and has survived while dozens of Madeley Wood beerhouses around it disappeared.

Strictly speaking, it isn't in the Ironbridge Gorge at all — it's in Madeley Wood.

We know that. We had a vote on it anyway, decided it was too good to leave out, and adopted it into our 18-pub story.

The traditional explanation for its unusual name comes from the workforce.

The pits, ironworks and brickyards around Madeley Wood attracted workers from far and wide.

Locally, people talked about men from “all nations”.

Somewhere along the way, the description became the name above the door.

Then came the Baguley family.

They held the licence for an extraordinary 103 years.

And from 1832 they brewed beer on the premises.

Road schemes, licensing reductions, industrial decline and demolition wiped scores of small pubs from this part of Madeley.

The All Nations slipped through the net.

Still there. Still a pub.

Our research currently places the Shakespeare at 1790.

That date puts it firmly into the period when Coalport was developing into one of the Gorge's great industrial communities.

China, canals, wharves, boats and later railways all brought people through the village.

Pubs followed the workforce.

The Shakespeare became part of that Coalport landscape and, unlike many of its contemporaries, survived the disappearance of the industries that had originally sustained the community.

This is one of the best examples of why simply searching modern pub names doesn't tell the story.

For most of its life, the Water Rat wasn't the Water Rat at all.

It was the Meadow Inn.

Our research dates its licensed history to 1802, beside the historic Meadow Ferry route across the Severn.

It was a working riverside pub rather than a destination gastropub.

Generations knew it as the Meadow.

Then, following a substantial redevelopment, it reopened in July 2020 as the Water Rat.

So although the Water Rat name is one of the newest on our list, the pub behind it has more than two centuries of history.

If we're choosing the best object connected with any of these 18 pubs, the Half Moon has a serious contender.

A gigantic jug.

The Half Moon's licence was granted in 1802, though the building sits on the footprint of an earlier coach house.

That pushes its pub history much further back than the 1840 date often repeated locally.

Jackfield then had around a dozen pubs serving potters, boatmen, railwaymen and the thousands of people employed in the riverside industries.

At some point, a landlord challenged the Coalport China Works to produce a jug “as big as a man could manage”.

If they managed it, he would fill it with ale.

They did.

So did he.

And the locals drank it dry.

Then a flood swept the enormous jug away.

Villagers recovered the broken pieces, put it back together and returned it to the pub.

It survives today at the Museum of Iron in Coalbrookdale.

The Half Moon also survived the landslips and road changes that completely altered this part of Jackfield.

The scenery changed.

The pub stayed.

The Robin Hood is one of Waterloo Street's great survivors.

An 1828 directory lists the pub, so we're now using 1828 as our working date.

That makes it a couple of years younger than the 1830 often quoted, and going back further is difficult because so few earlier sources survive.

But it's the people who make this one.

The pub became deeply connected with the Owen family, a dynasty whose names appear repeatedly in the pub history of Ironbridge and Jackfield.

And then there was Edwin “Ted” Owen.

Ted was famously short.

The sign above his door reportedly read: “Now that Robin Hood is dead, come and drink with Little Ted.”

His family connections read like a crawl of their own.

His sister Hannah ran the Railway Tavern. Their father George kept the Foresters Arms. Ancestors were connected with the Coopers Arms. Their great-niece Emmie Goodwin later ran the Horse & Jockey.

The Robin Hood even briefly stopped being a pub during the 1970s and became an antiques shop, before returning to licensed use later in the decade.

Other Waterloo Street pubs disappeared.

The Robin Hood survived.

Another modern name with a much older story.

The premises at 29 High Street date their pub history to 1829, when they operated as the Queen's Head Vaults, connected with the Queen's Head further down the street.

Then comes the elephant.

On 15 May 1932, a travelling circus paraded an elephant across the Iron Bridge.

The stunt was intended to demonstrate very publicly that the famous old bridge remained strong enough to take the weight.

The building itself subsequently went through several identities.

Many will remember it as The Old Wine Bar.

Later came It's All About Me, then The Cavern, before the premises reopened as Elephant Crossing in 2022.

So the elephant isn't a piece of random modern branding.

It's a nod to one of Ironbridge's strangest stories.

The Coalbrookdale Inn began trading in 1834.

And you couldn't ask for a more historically loaded location.

This was Coalbrookdale, the valley associated with the Darbys and the development of coke-smelted iron, surrounded by generations of ironworkers, miners, engineers, craftsmen and their families.

The pub became part of that working community.

And remarkably, much of its traditional pub character survived.

Rather than being opened out into one enormous modern bar, it retained the multi-room feel associated with an older public house.

The furnaces have gone quiet.

The workers' houses changed.

The Coalbrookdale Inn remains.

The Boat belongs to an age when the River Severn wasn't the view from the beer garden.

It was the road.

Our original working date of 1740 followed published CAMRA information, but local research shared with us since publication raises questions about it. The evidence now points to the present pub dating from around 1840 — so c.1840 is our working date, while we keep investigating the claim of earlier origins.

Whenever it opened, this was a pub built around the river, when boatmen and barge crews were moving people, raw materials and finished goods along the Severn.

By the 1881 census, widow Mary Cleeton was running the Boat.

Look at the occupations of the men living around it and old Jackfield suddenly comes alive: Barge Waterman. Brickmaker. Clay Miner.

This was their pub.

Even the building records its own growth. Changes in the brickwork reveal where earlier cottages were altered and joined as the pub expanded.

And then there's the Devil

According to an old Jackfield tale, a stranger once joined locals for a game of cards at the Boat.

Someone dropped a card.

He bent beneath the table to retrieve it.

And noticed that the stranger didn't have a human foot.

He had a cloven hoof.

The mysterious player was supposedly the Devil himself, who disappeared from the pub amid a sudden violent gust of wind.

Can we prove it? Absolutely not.

Would we leave it out? Absolutely not.

And here's another dating trap.

Look at the Valley and you'd be forgiven for putting it much higher up our ranking.

The building dates to 1757.

Originally called Severn House, it was a private residence and later became associated with several important local industrial families.

From 1871 it was occupied by Arthur Maw of Maw & Co.

Around 1890, craftsman Robert Henry Clarke installed the extraordinary encaustic tiles in the entrance hall and staircase, a wonderful surviving connection with the Gorge's tile industry.

But we're ranking pub histories, not simply the age of the bricks.

It wasn't until 1939 that the Wrekin Brewery acquired the property and converted it into a commercial hotel and taproom.

So: Building, 1757. Pub and hotel, 1939.

That's why the Valley sits at No.17.

After beginning in 1728, we've finally reached the 21st century.

The Coracle Micropub at 27 High Street opened in May 2018.

But the premises weren't sitting empty waiting for someone to invent craft beer.

Before becoming a pub, the High Street property had housed a succession of traditional businesses, including a printer, a jeweller and a butcher. CAMRA's local branch records all three previous uses.

Then two beer enthusiasts transformed the premises into a micropub in 2018.

And the name couldn't be more Ironbridge.

Coracles have been used on the Severn for centuries, for fishing, ferrying people and goods and simply crossing the river without paying a bridge toll. The Ironbridge Coracle Trust records their documented use in the Gorge for more than 350 years.

Photographs of local coracle makers and river users inside the pub deliberately connect the modern micropub with that much older tradition.

Which makes the Coracle a rather fitting place to finish.

Our youngest pub has a name borrowed from one of the Gorge's oldest forms of transport.