A big, busy Gloucester Road pub whose name blends two of the oldest elements in English place-naming: the court and the field
The Courtfield holds an impressive thirty-five hundred and twenty-nine reviews and a 4.3 – a very large sample – and it is a big, busy Gloucester Road pub whose name combines two of the most ancient and fundamental elements in all of English place-naming: the court and the field.
Court and field
“Courtfield” joins “court” and “field,” and both words carry deep history. We met “court” at the Earls Court Tavern – the manorial court, the seat of local justice and administration under the lord of the manor. This whole area, Earl’s Court and its surrounds, takes its name from exactly this: the court of the medieval earls. “Courtfield” almost certainly draws on the same root – a field associated with, or belonging to, the court of the manor.
“Field” is one of the oldest and most basic words in the English landscape – the open land, the cleared ground, the cultivated or grazed space that fed the community. English place names are absolutely saturated with fields: every “-field” ending across the country (Sheffield, Huddersfield, Macclesfield, and thousands more) records a field, an open space, a piece of worked or grazed land. The field is the fundamental unit of the agricultural landscape that underlies almost all English settlement.
The vanished fields of Kensington
The name is a reminder, like so many in this survey, of what this now-dense urban district once was: open country. Before the great Victorian expansion covered it in stucco terraces and mansion blocks, this part of Kensington was fields – agricultural land, market gardens, open country on the western edge of London. The “Courtfield” name preserves the memory of when there was an actual field here, associated with the manorial court, where now there is only brick, tarmac and one very large pub.
This survey has traced this transformation again and again – the pigs of Notting Hill, the market gardens of Chelsea, the grazing land where the terraces now stand. The names are the fossils of the vanished landscape: a “field” here, a “green” there, a “brook” somewhere else, all preserving in words a rural world that the city has entirely erased. To drink in the Courtfield is to drink on a field that has not been a field for a very long time.
The big Gloucester Road pub
The Courtfield is a large, busy pub near Gloucester Road station – one of those substantial, well-appointed pubs that serve a busy, transient, cosmopolitan district full of commuters, tourists, students and residents. Its very large review count reflects this heavy footfall: a big pub in a busy location, passing thousands of people through its doors. A 4.3 across thirty-five hundred people is a fair, solid, thoroughly trustworthy score – the honest verdict of a huge and varied crowd, exactly the kind of large-sample number this survey trusts most.
The pub
A large, busy, well-regarded Gloucester Road pub doing a fair 4.3 across a very large and real sample, named after the court and the field – two of the oldest roots of the English landscape, preserved in a place where both have long vanished under the city.
Verdict
Big, busy, fairly rated on a huge trustworthy sample, and named after the court and the field – the vanished rural roots beneath the Kensington streets.
Have a pint in this large and busy pub, and remember the field that was once here, beside the earl’s court, before the city grew over every green and open acre of it.
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]
Society breakdown. This.
Someone’s going to send this to their MP and the MP will recognize themselves and do absolutely nothing whatsoever about any of it.