We’re excited to introduce our newly revamped website designed to enhance your journey through the world of beer, cider, perry and historic pub interiors. Try the new site at https://www1.camra.org.uk/heritage-pubs. We recommend bookmarking this link.
Campaign for Real Ale Pub Heritage
Historic Pub Interiors

About

A particular joy of the UK's 50,000 or so pubs is their sheer variety.

They range from simple rural pubs to late-Victorian extravaganzas, from the genuinely old to the aggressively modern, from urban back-street boozers, through suburban estate pubs, to picture-postcard rural idylls. All architectural styles are represented, be it Art Nouveau or Art Deco, high Gothic or post-war Brutalist.

What is saddening, though, is how very few of our pub interiors are the same now, or nearly so, as when built. More often than not, you enter a pub with an unspoilt 'period' facade only to find the interior trashed or compromised. CAMRA is wholly committed to protecting our dwindling stock of truly historic pub interiors. Our Pub Heritage Group is made up of CAMRA members passionate about protecting and promoting these interiors. Some Group members are recognised architectural and pub historians. Here is a history of CAMRA's campaign to protect historic pub interiors.

CAMRA's national inventory of historic pub interiors lists the most precious of these survivors. You can read more about the gradings of heritage pubs within the inventory, about the types of heritage pubs, and the selection criteria we use to grade pubs with historic interiors.

The inventory is constantly evolving. Sadly, some pubs currently listed will either close or be ruined despite our best efforts to stop this. Other pubs are known to be at risk – see our list of Historic Pub Interiors in Peril.

More happily, we continue to discover previously unreported interiors deserving inclusion (and we're always eager to hear from anyone who feels a particular pub is worth considering – please email info@pubheritage.camra.org.uk which is also the address for any updates or comments you might wish to share with us)

Historic pub interiors can be accessed on this website in the following ways:

  • Search for pubs with historic interiors in a given location, complete with descriptions.

  • Select a mini-guide, suitable to be printed, of all historic pub interiors in a particular county

  • View a complete list of all pubs in the national inventory of historic pub interiors, suitable to be printed, as a quick reference guide.

Ten Real Heritage Pubs guides have so far been published – for London, East of England, North East England, Scotland, Wales, Yorkshire, Midlands, North West England, South West England and South East England. You can purchase copies from the CAMRA bookshop, though some of the older books are currently out of print. Updated versions of these guides will be prodiced in due course. You can also access Real Heritage Pubs guides for all parts of the UK on this website.

Another of the Group's aims concerns Pubs as Listed Buildings; getting pubs statutorily 'listed' as being of special architectural or historic interest affords them significant protection from insensitive development.

Our website also contains a glossary of architectural terms which commonly arise in pub descriptions plus suggestions for further reading about historic pubs. 'Architrave', 'Corbelling', 'Terrazzo' – what do they mean? Find out in our glossary of architectural terms relevant to pubs.

If you want to be kept regularly up to date on the changes to the status of the national inventory of historic pub interiors, then please join our email mailing list. Monthly bulletins are sent out each month, and are also posted here on this web site.