The Fitzroy Tavern named the neighbourhood. Now a second pub has named itself after the neighbourhood. The snake is eating its tail.
We need to walk through this carefully, because it is genuinely circular.
The Fitzroy family owned the land. A pub on that land called itself the Fitzroy Tavern. That pub became so central to the neighbourhood’s life that the whole district took its name from the pub, and became Fitzrovia. And now there is a second pub, in that district, which has named itself Fitzrovia – after the neighbourhood – which was named after the first pub.
A pub, named after a district, named after a pub. Twelve hundred and eighty-one reviews, a 4.3, and a naming logic that eats itself.
The recursion
The Prat’s linguistics desk has diagrammed this and reports that it is a genuine loop. To explain the name of this pub you must reference the district. To explain the district you must reference the Fitzroy Tavern. And the Fitzroy Tavern is named after the Fitzroys, who are the only fixed point in the entire chain – the one name that refers to actual people rather than to another name.
Everything else is pubs and districts pointing at each other. It is the naming equivalent of two mirrors facing one another, and the reflection goes back further than anybody bothers to look.
The Fitzroys, briefly
Since they are the anchor, they deserve a mention. The Fitzroys are the Dukes of Grafton, and they descend from Charles II and his mistress Barbara Villiers. “Fitzroy” is Norman French for “son of the king” – the traditional surname given to a monarch’s illegitimate children.
So the entire district, and now two pubs, ultimately trace their name to the acknowledged bastard of a seventeenth-century king. Fitzrovia means, if you follow it all the way down, “the royal bastard’s land,” and everybody says it a hundred times a day without a flicker.
The Prat has noted this pattern across the whole survey: the grander a London name sounds, the more likely it is to bottom out in a mistress, a bastard, an accident, or a mistake. Fitzrovia is all four at once.
The pub
A perfectly good modern Fitzrovia pub doing a solid trade to the after-work crowd. Ten to twenty pounds, a 4.3, unremarkable in the best sense. It is not trying to compete with the Fitzroy Tavern’s history, and it would be mad to try, because the Fitzroy Tavern named the ground they are both standing on.
Verdict
A decent pub with a dizzying name, sitting in a district it was named after, which was named after another pub, which was named after a king’s illegitimate son.
The naming loop, elsewhere
It is worth noting that this kind of recursion is rarer than you would think. Most districts are named after geography (a ford, a hill, a field), a person (a saint, a landowner), or a feature (a bridge, a cross). Almost no district in Britain is named after a pub.
Fitzrovia is the great exception, and it means that every business here that reaches for the district name is, without realising it, reaching all the way back to a single tavern on Charlotte Street. The Fitzroy Tavern did not just name itself. It named the ground, and now the ground is naming the buildings, and the buildings are naming their bars.
Verdict
A decent pub with a dizzying name, sitting in a district it was named after, which was named after another pub, which was named after a king’s illegitimate son.
Go, have a pint, and try to say the whole chain out loud without losing your place. Nobody manages it the first time.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
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