Three Nottingham pubs - the Trip, Ye Olde Salutation Inn and The Bell Inn - all assert that they are among the oldest in England. So does Ye Olde Fighting Cocks in St Albans, which closed briefly in 2022 before being saved, and a small handful of other contenders scattered across the country including the Old Ferry Boat Inn at Holywell. Nobody has ever settled the title to general satisfaction, and probably nobody can. The Trip's 1189 claim is the boldest of the lot, pegged to the moment crusaders supposedly stopped here on their way to the Holy Land - the name itself, 'Trip to Jerusalem', uses 'trip' in its older sense of a stop or stage on a journey. There is no surviving paperwork to confirm any of this. What there is, instead, is the cave network.

The pub is built against the sandstone cliff that supports Nottingham Castle, and the caves behind its walls are demonstrably old - they were used as a brewhouse for the castle, and may date from around the time the castle was built in 1067. That is firmer ground than the 1189 claim. Brewing in the cool, even temperature of the rock made obvious sense for medieval brewers, and the cave-network beneath central Nottingham has been used and re-used for everything from tanning to bomb shelters over the centuries. The pub's later history is more documented: a map drawn by John Speed shows a building on this site in 1610, and the oldest visible parts of the current structure were probably built between 1650 and 1660. By 1751 it was operating as an inn called The Pilgrim, and shortly after that William Standford bought the place. The 'Trip to Jerusalem' name took hold later.

The pub rambles. Front rooms feel like a normal historic pub - timber beams, low ceilings, decent ale - but step further back and the walls become rock, the ceilings vault, and the air takes on the cool damp of a cellar. Drinkers find themselves in chambers carved from solid sandstone, often with the bedrock visible overhead. A model galleon sits high on a shelf in one of the inner rooms; local legend says it is cursed and anyone who tries to clean it dies shortly afterwards, which is the kind of legend a pub like this collects and maintains with care. Locals call the place simply 'the Trip', and have done for generations. Whether or not the date on the wall is accurate, the building is unambiguously old, and it sits in the bones of the city in a way few buildings anywhere do.

The Trip's claim is not that the current building has stood since 1189 - it has not. The claim is that there has been a drinking-house on this spot, in some form, since then, continuous through the centuries even as the building above it changed. Whether you accept that depends on how generously you read 'continuous' and how strictly you read 'pub'. Either way, the rock under the floor really is medieval, and the brewers really did work it. The arguments will continue, traded between landlords from Nottingham to St Albans, and probably never settled. Meanwhile, the pints get pulled, the visitors duck under low lintels into chambers cut from the cliff, and the Trip keeps doing what it has done by any honest reckoning for at least four centuries: selling beer to anyone passing under the castle wall.