Pubs in Faversham: Historic Inns in Britain's Brewing Town

Faversham is one of those rare English towns where the pub is not a sideline but the main event. This is the home of Shepherd Neame, Britain's oldest brewer, which has been making beer on the same plot beside Faversham Creek since the sixteenth century and was formally established in 1698. The brewery still works in the middle of town on Court Street, and on brew days the warm, biscuity smell of mash drifts across the medieval lanes while dray vehicles thread the narrow streets. Because so many of the town's pubs are Shepherd Neame tied houses, you are rarely more than a couple of doors from that familiar diamond sign hanging over a timber-framed front.

What makes drinking here special is the sheer depth of history packed into a small, walkable centre. The Bear Inn on the Market Place is generally reckoned to be the oldest surviving pub in town, dating to the mid-sixteenth century, while the nearby Three Tuns, built around 1605, has the distinction of being the brewery's first ever owned house. Over on West Street, the Sun Inn occupies a building with roots in the fourteenth century, all sloping floors and low beams, and now offers rooms upstairs as well as pints below. On Abbey Street, widely called one of the finest medieval streets in the south east, the Phoenix Tavern pairs a proper local atmosphere with ambitious cooking that has earned AA recognition.

Then there is the creekside dimension, which is what really sets Faversham apart from other Kentish market towns. The town grew up around its tidal creek and the wider Swale, and the water still shapes where people drink. Standard Quay, a short stroll past Abbey Street, has its weathered warehouses, moored Thames sailing barges and a salty, working-boatyard feel that makes an afternoon drink there feel like stepping back a century. Push further out to Hollowshore, where the creek meets Oare Creek among the marshes, and you reach the wonderfully remote Shipwright's Arms, a seventeenth-century free house that feels gloriously cut off from the modern world and is a fine reward at the end of a muddy waterside walk.

If you want to make a day of it, Shepherd Neame's own self-guided town walk links nine of its historic pubs in a loop around the centre, a good way to take in the architecture between halves. Market days, Tuesday, Friday and Saturday, bring the centre alive and the pubs fill naturally; the first weekend of September belongs to the Hop Festival, when the streets fill with music, Morris sides and beer to celebrate the town's hop-picking heritage, and every pub garden and frontage is pressed into service.

Expect a genuine mix rather than a manicured circuit. You will find snug back-street boozers where conversation is the entertainment, food-led inns doing Sunday roasts with Kentish produce, and waterside spots best caught at high tide. Cask ale is taken seriously here, as you would hope in a brewing town, and many places pour seasonal Shepherd Neame beers you will struggle to find elsewhere, alongside guest ales and Kentish ciders. Whether you are after a quiet half in a four-hundred-year-old bar, a long lunch by the water or a proper session during a festival weekend, Faversham rewards anyone who likes their pubs old, characterful and unmistakably local. Use the listings below to find your own corner of it.