Named for the guild of carpenters, one of hundreds of pubs honouring the trades that actually built the city
The Carpenters Arms holds a 4.4 from thirteen hundred people, and belongs to one of the largest and least celebrated families of pub names in England: the ones named after trades.
The Arms of the trades
Pub signs are heraldic, and heraldry belongs to the aristocracy – but not only to them. The medieval trade guilds, the livery companies, also had coats of arms, and a great many pubs are named after them: the Carpenters Arms, the Bricklayers Arms, the Masons Arms, the Weavers Arms, the Blacksmiths Arms.
These are the pubs of the people who actually built and made things – who cut the timber, laid the bricks, forged the iron, wove the cloth. Where the Marquis Cornwallis and the Marlborough Arms celebrate generals and dukes, the Carpenters Arms celebrates the men who built the pub the generals drank in.
The Prat’s history desk notes that these trade-name pubs are a quiet democratic thread running through English pub signage – a reminder that not every name on a wall is an aristocrat, and that the guilds of working men had arms of their own, and were proud enough of them to hang them over a door.
The Worshipful Company
The Worshipful Company of Carpenters is a genuine, ancient institution – one of the livery companies of the City of London, dating back to the fourteenth century. In their medieval heyday the guilds controlled who could practise a trade, set standards, trained apprentices, and wielded real economic and political power.
Most of them survive today as charitable and ceremonial bodies, having long since lost their control over the trades themselves. The Carpenters still exist, still have their hall in the City, still run charities and support the craft – and a pub in Bloomsbury quietly carries their name, most of its drinkers unaware that “Carpenters Arms” refers to a six-hundred-year-old corporation rather than a generic bloke with a saw.
The honesty of the trade pub
There is something appealing about a trade-name pub in a district like Bloomsbury, which is otherwise all intellect and institutions. The Carpenters Arms is a reminder that the University of London, the British Museum, and every grand townhouse in the district were physically built by carpenters, bricklayers, and masons – the people whose guilds these pubs honour, and who rarely get a blue plaque.
The pub
A solid, traditional Bloomsbury local at ten to twenty pounds, doing a 4.4 across a large real sample. The reviews describe exactly what the name promises: an honest, unpretentious, well-kept pub of the kind built for working people and still serving them.
Verdict
A good, honest traditional pub named after the six-hundred-year-old guild of the men who physically built London, in a district that usually only remembers the people who thought about it.
Marchmont Street
The pub sits on Marchmont Street, one of Bloomsbury’s most pleasant shopping streets and, fittingly, a street full of independent trades – a proper bookshop, a hardware shop, cafes, the kind of small businesses that the guilds once represented. It is exactly the right home for a trade-name pub: a street that still, in its modest way, runs on the labour of people who make and sell and fix things.
Around the corner is the Marquis Cornwallis, named for a general, and a few streets away the Marlborough Arms, named for a duke. The Carpenters Arms holds its own among them, quietly insisting that the people who built the district deserve a sign too.
Verdict
A good, honest traditional pub named after the six-hundred-year-old guild of the men who physically built London, in a district that usually only remembers the people who thought about it.
Go, have a pint, and raise it to the carpenters, without whom there would be no bar to lean on.
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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Somewhere a planner is thinking “I went to university for this?” That person is now on their sixth coffee before noon.