The Golden Ball Inn

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.