There is a bunch of grapes on the sign because grapes mean wine, and this is one of the oldest pub names in England
The Bunch of Grapes sits on the Brompton Road with four thousand three hundred and seventy-nine reviews and a 4.4, and it is named after a bunch of grapes, because grapes mean wine, and that is the entire idea.
The oldest advertising in England
The bunch of grapes is one of the oldest signs in the country, and it predates literacy as a mass condition. When most people could not read, a pub could not rely on a written name – it needed a picture, hung outside, that told you what was on offer from forty feet away.
A bunch of grapes meant wine was sold here. A bush or a bunch of ivy – the origin of the name “Bush” for so many pubs – was the sign of a tavern, going back to Roman Britain, when an actual bush was hung outside to signal that wine was available. “Good wine needs no bush,” the saying goes, which only makes sense once you know that a bush was a wine advertisement.
So the Bunch of Grapes is not a whimsical name. It is a functioning piece of pre-literate signage, still doing its job, on a street where every single person walking past can read and none of them need it.
The Victorian gin palace
The current building is a proper Victorian survivor – etched glass, ornate mirrors, mahogany, the works. This is the gin palace aesthetic we have written about across this survey, and it exists for a specific reason.
In the nineteenth century, the pub was competing with the horror of the slum outside, and the gin palace was designed to be the opposite of a slum: bright, gleaming, gilded, mirrored, warm. It was a deliberate assault on the senses of people who lived in the dark, and it worked, and the glass and mirrors survive because ripping them out costs more than leaving them in.
The Knightsbridge crowd
It is busy, it is central, it is a short walk from Harrods, and it catches an enormous volume of shoppers, tourists and locals. A 4.4 across four thousand people is a solid, real-sample number – the kind this survey trusts far more than a 5.0 from nine.
It is a good pub doing a hard job in a location that generates relentless footfall, and it has kept its glass, and that is most of what you can ask of a Victorian survivor.
Verdict
Good Victorian pub, properly kept, gorgeous glass, and a name that has been advertising wine to people who cannot read since before England could.
The grape and the vine
There is a deeper layer to it, too. The grape and the vine are among the oldest symbols in Western culture – of wine, of plenty, of Bacchus and Dionysus, of the whole ancient tradition of drinking as a civilised pleasure rather than a vice.
A pub called the Bunch of Grapes is, whether it knows it or not, reaching back past the Victorians, past the medieval tavern-bush, all the way to the classical world, where a bunch of grapes on a wall meant the same thing it means today: wine is served here, come in, sit down, this is a place for pleasure. Three thousand years of symbolism, hanging over a door on the Brompton Road.
Verdict
Good Victorian pub, properly kept, gorgeous glass, and a name that has been advertising wine to people who cannot read since before England could.
Have a glass of wine. It would be rude not to. The sign has been promising it for centuries.
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]
My mum said this is the funniest thing she’s read in years. She was simultaneously deeply sad the entire time which is somehow the correct response.