On your left is the Pickerel, first licensed in sixteen oh eight and still one of several claimants to the title of Cambridge’s oldest pub... reputedly the oldest continuing one, if you like a careful caveat with your pint. What faces Magdalene Street is the tidy early nineteenth-century front: pale gault brick, three storeys, neat windows with shallow curved heads, very Regency, very respectable. But behind that sits the older creature entirely: a sixteenth-century timber-framed range. A Tudor body in a Regency coat.
This place makes sense once you picture Cambridge’s coaching and brewing trade. Before the railway, central inns ran scheduled coaches to London, Birmingham, Norwich, and Fakenham; the Eagle alone sent out a six a.m. coach to Holborn, returning at three p.m., and a seven a.m. service to Birmingham by way of Bedford, Northampton, and Leamington. Inns needed working yards, not just drinkers. The Pickerel had stables in the courtyard, and a harness-room for horse gear. On the ninth of October, nineteen twenty-two, Fred Silk cleaned his motor bicycle in that harness-room, tossed down a match, and flames jumped at once... then the petrol tank exploded. So much for a quiet yard job.
The beer once came from here too. William Bullen worked on these premises from eighteen fifty-one to eighteen sixty-nine as innkeeper and brewer, with a brewery out back. Later the Pickerel became a Bailey and Tebbutt tied house, supplied by Cambridge’s Panton Brewery, until Greene King absorbed the firm in nineteen twenty-five.
You’ll usually find it open well into the evening. Cross back over Magdalene Bridge into Bridge Street. The round church on your right after about a hundred and fifty metres is your next stop.
