Ye Olde Mitre, LondonYe Olde Mitre
- Best time
- Early evening on a weekday
- Getting there
- Down Ely Court, a passage between Hatton Garden and Ely Place — there is one small sign and that is all
Why it’s in the log
The hardest pub here to find, and the one with the best paperwork problem. Its own account gives 1546, when a tavern was built for the servants of the Bishop of Ely, whose London palace occupied this ground from the late thirteenth century. Historic England dates the standing building to about 1773, with the interior remodelled in the early twentieth century. Both numbers circulate as "the date," and they describe entirely different things.
The genuinely strange fact is jurisdictional. Ely Place was an enclave: physically inside London, legally attached to the Bishop of Ely's diocese and administered as part of Cambridgeshire, with the Metropolitan Police holding no authority whatever inside it. The arrangement survived into the twentieth century — so for most of this pub's existence, the law and the licence over it came from somewhere else entirely.
It is Grade II listed, on CAMRA's National Inventory, and run by Fuller's. The way in is Ely Court, which you will walk past unless you already know it is there.
Also logged in London
All of London →
Cittie of Yorke
London, United KingdomA drinking house on this spot since about 1430, in a building from the 1920s — plus a Dylan Thomas poem that stayed lost for sixty years.
Gordon's Wine Bar
London, United KingdomLondon's oldest wine bar, poured from a candlelit cellar under Villiers Street since 1890.
Hoop and Grapes
London, United KingdomA leaning late-seventeenth-century timber house that Historic England calls a type once common in London and now very rare.
