The Old Shed

When Dzhan Mustafa couldn’t buy beer on his Sunday off in 2023, he opened The Old Shed on Cinque Ports Street, a road named after the medieval confederation that once exempted Rye from royal taxes, ran its own courts, and provided ships for the Crown. The irony: a 24-year-old Bulgarian waiter solving a licensing gap on a street commemorating an alliance that wielded more legal freedom than most of England. Open 11am to 11pm daily, because even ancient privileges couldn’t guarantee Sunday beer.

The street itself has its own recent claim to fame. A cluster of derelict buildings nearby was reborn behind an angular timber façade by Jonathan Dunn Architects, a renovation careful enough to work around Rye’s protected medieval town wall, and good enough to win a RIBA South East Award and a feature on ArchDaily. So a road already carrying centuries of legal history now also carries a shed selling imported lager and a piece of award-winning contemporary design within a few doors of each other. There’s even a second Old Shed, a cafe out in the Cotswolds near Charlbury, entirely unconnected to Dzhan’s shop, proof that in small-town England even original ideas sometimes arrive in duplicate.