The hand offering a flower is one of the sweetest and oldest of pub images – a simple gesture of welcome and goodwill
The Hand and Flower near Olympia holds seventeen hundred and four reviews and a 4.1 – a large, fair-scoring sample – and it carries one of the gentlest and most charming of all old pub names: the hand offering a flower, a simple image of welcome, goodwill and hospitality.
The offered flower
“The Hand and Flower” conjures a lovely image: a hand holding out a flower, offering it. It is one of those old pub signs whose meaning is not a forgotten heraldic puzzle but a simple, human, universal gesture – the offering of a flower, which in every culture and age means goodwill, affection, welcome, peace. To offer someone a flower is one of the oldest and sweetest of human gestures, and a pub that takes this as its sign is announcing, in the gentlest possible way, that visitors are welcome.
This is a refreshing change from so many of the names in this survey. There is no conquest here, no aristocratic title, no drowned prince or plotting assassin. Just a hand, and a flower, offered in welcome. It is hospitality distilled to a single tender image, and there is something genuinely lovely about it.
The origins of the sign
Pub signs like the Hand and Flower go back to the earliest days of the English pub, when signs were essential because most people could not read. A pub could not rely on a written name; it needed a clear, memorable, recognisable image that anyone could identify and describe – “meet me at the Hand and Flower.” So pubs adopted vivid, simple pictures: animals, objects, symbols, gestures. The image was the name, in an age of widespread illiteracy.
The Hand and Flower belongs to a family of “hand” signs – the Hand and Shears, the Hand and Racquet, and others – where a hand holds some object indicating a trade, an activity, or, as here, simply a gesture. The hand offering a flower may have originally indicated a specific trade or connection, or may simply have been chosen as an appealing, welcoming image. Its exact origin, like so many pub signs, is lost – but its meaning, unlike so many, remains transparent and warm.
The language of flowers
There is a whole lost art hovering behind this sign: the “language of flowers,” the Victorian practice of assigning specific meanings to particular flowers, so that a bouquet could carry a coded message. A red rose meant love, a white lily purity, and so on – an elaborate floral code through which sentiments too delicate to speak could be conveyed. To offer a flower was to offer a message, and the Victorians read these floral messages with great seriousness. The Hand and Flower, offering its single bloom, offers – in this reading – a wordless message of welcome and goodwill to every visitor.
The pub
A large, well-established pub near the Olympia exhibition centre doing a fair 4.1 across a large and real sample, serving the busy, mixed crowd of the area under one of the gentlest and most welcoming of all old pub signs.
Verdict
Fair, busy, and named with one of the sweetest images in all of pub heraldry – a hand offering a flower, hospitality and welcome in a single gesture.
Have a pint under the hand and flower, and enjoy a pub sign that, for once, means exactly what it shows: a warm, wordless offering of welcome.
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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