From Ms Pocock to the Present Day: The Women Who Have Always Run Things on Westgate Street

On International Women’s Day, Bath’s oldest continually trading pub reflects on four centuries of women in business – and the team shaping its future today.

No. 14 Westgate Street has never really belonged to one person. Not in 400-plus years.

It began as an Elizabethan townhouse, built around 1580. Its first recorded occupant, Richard Gay, served as Mayor of Bath five times over. But like the city itself, the building changed with the centuries. By 1694 it had become one of Bath’s principal lodging houses, run by Ms Pocock – a woman whose title stands out in the records precisely because she didn’t need anyone else’s name attached to hers.

That mattered then. It still matters now.

Westgate Street has long been one of Bath’s commercial arteries, and unusually for its time, women appear again and again in its business history: shopkeepers, textile workers, hat-makers, lodging-house operators. Women who didn’t make speeches about enterprise – they simply practised it.

By 1792 The Grapes appears in the record for the first time, housed in a building that has stood for over 440 years. Commerce shifted, but the pattern didn’t: capable people, trusted with responsibility, shaping the place.

Today, that continues, not as nostalgia, but as lived reality.

The Grapes is owned and directed by Ellie and Jonny, who look after the building, the finances, and the long-term decisions that keep a historic pub standing, solvent, and full of life. But the daily rhythm – the welcome, the music, the atmosphere, the sense that something is always about to happen – is run by Ellie Burton, the pub’s General Manager.

Still only in her early thirties, Burton has spent years running major stages at festivals and working alongside some of the most respected figures in the live music world. That experience shows at The Grapes, where she programmes bands, manages budgets, leads the team, and keeps the whole place moving at speed whilst making it look effortless.

Behind the scenes, Charlie Harding handles marketing for the pub, bringing clarity, consistency, and momentum to how The Grapes presents itself to the outside world. It is the kind of work that rarely shouts for attention but makes a measurable difference.

“When we think about International Women’s Day, we don’t reach for slogans. We think about Ms Pocock running one of Bath’s principal lodging houses in 1694, and the women of Westgate Street building businesses from scratch long before it was considered remarkable. The story here isn’t about novelty. It’s about inheritance – capability passed forward. We’re very proud to be part of that.”

– Ellie Leiper, Co-Owner, The Grapes Bath

The Grapes has never belonged to one person. It has always belonged to the people who care for it well. On International Women’s Day 2026, the pub is proud to celebrate the ones doing that now.