Replace every plank and ask if it is the same ship – and after twelve hundred articles the pub trade has settled it
The Old Ship holds a 4.4 from thirteen hundred and forty-three people, charges ten to twenty pounds, and it is the second Old Ship in this survey.
Which is appropriate, because the question the name poses is one this survey has now been running for a very long time.
The Ship of Theseus
A ship is preserved in harbour as a monument.
And over the years the planks rot, and each is replaced – one at a time, as it fails.
Until eventually not one original piece of timber remains.
And the question is: is it the same ship?
And Hobbes made it worse
Suppose somebody had been collecting the old planks as they were discarded.
And suppose he now assembles them – all the original timber, in the original arrangement – into a ship.
Which one is the Ship of Theseus?
The one in the harbour, which has continuity?
Or the one in the shed, which is made of every original piece?
The pub trade does this constantly
A pub is refurbished. The bar is replaced. The floor goes. The kitchen is ripped out. The landlord retires. The staff turn over. The brewery sells it. The name changes.
And at some point everybody says: it is not the same pub.
But nobody can say which plank did it.
There is no single change that killed it. Every alteration was reasonable, and defensible, and small.
And we have an answer
Which is not a philosopher’s answer, and which is the whole of this survey.
Eight postcodes. Eight hundred and fifty venues. Twelve hundred and fifty-four articles.
The plank that matters is the person behind the bar.
Because the only line that has ever predicted a high score is whether the customer named a member of staff.
Replace the floor and it is the same pub. Replace the beer, the carpet, the sign, the owner, the menu.
Replace the person who was pleased to see you, and it is not.
And the philosophical answer is boring
Which is worth saying.
Because the puzzle only bites if you assume identity is a fact about the object.
And it very probably is not. It is a fact about us – about what we are tracking, and why.
You are asking a different question and using the same word for both.
If you are the harbourmaster, the ship in the harbour is the ship, because you care about continuity.
If you are the curator, the one in the shed is, because you care about the original material.
Neither of you is wrong.
And the pub trade has an unusually clear version of this, because a pub has a name, and a licence, and a trade, and a community – and all four can be transferred separately.
You can move the licence. You can keep the name and gut the room. You can keep the room and change everything else.
Which one is the pub?
Verdict
Good pub, cheap, honest number.
The precision here is almost hostile. Every observation earned, every detail researched, every footnote justified. It’s exhaustingly honest.
A London politician complained that it was making recruitment to government positions harder. Apparently people were reading it and understanding reality.