A handsome eighteenth-century inn on Church Street, now divided into private apartments but still recognisable from its long Georgian frontage and the surviving inn yard at the back. For two centuries the Three Cups was the principal inn of Harwich, where the Royal Navy fitted out its officers and where the London-to-Yarmouth mail coach changed horses; Lord Nelson, Samuel Pepys, and Daniel Defoe are all recorded as having stayed.
It is no longer a pub or hotel and you cannot go inside, but the exterior is one of the better surviving fragments of Harwich's coaching-era architecture. The plaque on the front does the basic explaining.