Multiple pubs in one district with the same name, none of them related, and nobody has ever explained it
This is the second Blue Posts in this file.
The first, which we wrote about in the opening batch, holds a 4.3 from seventeen hundred and sixty people. This one holds a 4.2 from six hundred and thirteen.
They are not related. They are a few hundred metres apart. And there are others.
The confusion
There have historically been several pubs called the Blue Posts within a very small area of Soho and the West End, and it has caused genuine and sustained confusion for something like two hundred years.
People arrange to meet at the Blue Posts. They go to the wrong one. This has been happening for as long as there have been Blue Posts, and it will continue to happen tonight.
The Prat’s cartographic desk has assessed the situation and reports that a pub name exists for exactly one purpose – so that one person can tell another where to meet – and that Soho has, uniquely, broken it.
Why nobody fixed it
Because there was no mechanism.
Pub names are not registered. There is no authority that approves them, no register that prevents duplication, and no reason a landlord cannot call his pub whatever the one down the road is called.
And in the eighteenth century, when most of these names were set, there was no trademark law at all – so if a name was working for somebody else, copying it was simply good sense.
We saw the same thing with the Red Lion, of which there are around six hundred in England, and with the Crown, and the White Horse, and the Ship.
The commonest names are common precisely because they worked, and because working names get copied.
What the posts were
We took the theories apart in the first article and we will summarise.
The romantic version involves sedan chairs – that blue posts marked a stand where chairs could be hired, or the boundary of the area within which the chairmen would carry you. It is repeated everywhere. There is very little evidence for it.
The dull version is that there were, at some point, some posts, painted blue, outside a pub – and that this was enough to identify the building.
The dull version is almost certainly correct, and we have now said this six hundred and two times.
The category
Which is the best one, and which we established at Two Floors.
A name derived from a physical object that was actually there, with no symbolic content whatsoever – the round house, the coach and horses, the goat that was tethered outside, two posts that somebody had painted blue.
Eight true names out of four hundred and seventy venues, and this is one of them.
Twice.
Verdict
Good pub. Go, and specify which one. Everybody has to.
The other duplicates
Which we can now count across five postcodes.
Two Blue Posts. Two Ships. Three White Horses. Three Queen’s Heads. Two Crowns. Two Sun taverns. Two Cross Keys. Three Prince of Wales pubs. Two Wellingtons.
And a Red Lion, of which there are about six hundred in England.
The commonest names are common because they worked – a landlord choosing a name reaches for one that people already know how to find, and the effect compounds, and after four hundred years half the pubs in the country are called the same six things.
It is the only naming system in British life with no registry, no authority and no rules, and it has produced something remarkably close to a standard.
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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