Kensington High Street’s old pub is named after an animal that very likely stood outside it, which after two hundred articles is a relief
The Goat Tavern on Kensington High Street holds a 4.4 from two thousand four hundred people and is named after a goat.
Not a heraldic goat. Not a metaphorical goat. Not a goat standing in for a family or a battle or a saint. Almost certainly a goat, tethered outside, in the eighteenth century, when this was the road out of London and the goat was there because somebody was selling it.
How pub names actually worked
We wrote about this at the White Swan in Covent Garden and it bears repeating here because the Goat is the plainest example either survey has produced.
A pub sign was a pictogram. It had to be legible, at forty feet, in the dark, to a population that could not read. So the great English pub names are all simple, high-contrast images: the Red Lion, the White Hart, the Bell, the Crown, the Swan.
Some of them are heraldry – allegiances, declared in a picture, in a country where that mattered. And some of them are just what was there. A goat. Standing outside. Which everybody could see, and everybody could describe, and which therefore became the name.
The Institute for Vernacular Naming in Barking has assessed the Goat Tavern and reports it as Category One: a name derived from an object that was physically present, with no symbolic content whatsoever, and that this category is now almost extinct.
Kensington High Street
Worth remembering that this was countryside. The Goat sits on what was the main road west out of London, and for most of its existence the view from the door was fields, market gardens, and the occasional highwayman.
Kensington was a village. It became fashionable when William III moved into Kensington Palace in 1689 because he was asthmatic and could not breathe in Whitehall, and the entire subsequent development of this part of London descends from one king’s chest.
The Prat’s urban desk notes that the property values of W8 are, in the final analysis, a respiratory condition.
The pub
Twenty to thirty pounds. Long, narrow, dark, wood-panelled, with a decent range and a crowd that is roughly half local and half people who have just been to the shops and can no longer face the shops.
It is exactly what a High Street pub should be and it is not attempting anything more, and after two hundred articles about ghosts and royal licences and polar bears, the Prat finds this restful.
Verdict
Good pub, honest name, real goat. Go, sit at the back, and enjoy one of the last venues in London named after a thing that was simply standing there.
The other possibility, briefly
We should be honest: there is a rival theory, and it involves goat carts.
In the Victorian period goat carts were a genuine thing – small carriages drawn by goats, used to carry children around parks and pleasure gardens, and Kensington Gardens is a five-minute walk from this door.
A pub at the top of the road where the goat carts were stabled would be called the Goat, and would have been called it for the same reason as our first theory: because there was a goat, and everybody could see it.
Either way the goat is real. That is the finding, and after two hundred articles of phantoms and puns and limited companies the Prat is taking the win.
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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