The Ye Olde Mitre Tavern

Tucked away in Bank Place, just off Collins Street, stands a building that feels like a time slip. The Mitre Tavern, with its steep gabled roof, narrow doorways and creaking floorboards, looks as though it’s been lifted straight from 18th‑century London and dropped into Melbourne’s corporate heart by accident. It’s widely regarded as the city’s oldest surviving building – a relic from the 1840s, when Melbourne was little more than tents and timber huts along the Yarra.

Originally built as a private residence, the building became the Mitre Tavern in 1868 when vintner William Thompson secured a publican’s licence. His brother Henry soon took over, and the tavern quickly became a gathering place for politicians, lawyers, hunters, artists and rogues. Its name was borrowed from London’s Ye Old Mitre Tavern, a favourite haunt of writers and eccentrics, and Melbourne’s version carried that same old‑world charm into the colonies.

The Mitre Tavern, 1956.

By the 1870s, the Mitre was already steeped in legend. The Melbourne Dog Club held its first meetings there; polo players and hunters treated it as an unofficial clubhouse. Judges and barristers from nearby courts slipped in after hours, turning the tavern into a smoky extension of the legal world. As the city grew upward and outward, the Mitre stubbornly stayed the same – an English inn clinging to its corner while skyscrapers rose around it. Its steep roof still seems to wait for snow that never comes, and its tiny windows echo the old British “window tax”.

Attempts to modernise the Mitre were fiercely resisted. In 1923, health officials ordered new bedrooms and signage. The licensee argued that altering the building would be vandalism, and the magistrate agreed. The tavern survived again in 1930, when the Royal Insurance Company bought it with plans to demolish it. Public outcry and a change of heart saved it, with the company eventually praising its Gothic façade as an architectural treasure.

The Mitre’s charm isn’t just architectural. Step inside and you feel it immediately: the smell of oak and beer, the uneven stairs, the dim stained‑glass glow. It’s a place thick with memory – and, some say, with ghosts.

For decades, staff and patrons have reported sightings of a mysterious woman drifting through the upstairs rooms or standing silently on the balcony. Her name, they say, is Connie Waugh. Connie was an actress, showgirl and daring motorist, famous in early 1900s Melbourne for her flamboyant fashion and her scandalous affair with Sir Rupert Clarke, heir to Australia’s first baronetcy. When Rupert ended the relationship, Connie’s life reportedly spiralled. Some claim she took her life in one of the Mitre’s rooms; others say she died of influenza. Her portrait still hangs by the staircase, watching over the tavern she supposedly haunts.

Connie Waugh

Witnesses describe cold breezes, flickering lights, and objects flying from shelves. One manager saw a black shadow on the balcony; others speak of a glowing cocoon of light or a woman in white singing softly. Yet no official record of Connie’s death exists. Court documents suggest she left Australia after her affair ended, possibly for America. If she didn’t die at the Mitre, then who is the ghost? Some point to Ellen Norah Flannery, a former licensee who died on the premises in 1914.

The Mitre Tavern, 2026.

Today, the Mitre remains one of Melbourne’s most atmospheric pubs – a rare survivor of the city’s colonial past. Staff still report strange images on security cameras and unexplained disturbances in the upstairs bar. Patrons sometimes hear singing behind closed doors. Few realise that the tavern even inspired the name of the Mitre 10 hardware chain, coined by founders drinking there one night.

Stand outside the Mitre at dusk and you can almost hear the clip of hooves and see gaslight glowing through its windows. Inside, time feels suspended.

Whether haunted by ghosts or simply by history, the Mitre Tavern endures: a living fragment of old Melbourne.