Six hundred of them in England, and the animal tells you nothing while the colour tells you everything
The Red Lion on Hoxton Street holds a 4.1 from five hundred and sixty-one people, charges ten to twenty pounds, and it is the second Red Lion in this survey.
There are around six hundred of them in England, and it is the commonest pub name in the country.
The colour is the message
Which is the fact that unlocks the whole of heraldry and which nobody is ever taught.
A lion is generic. Every family in Europe had one. The animal tells you almost nothing at all.
The colour tells you everything.
A red lion is Scotland, or John of Gaunt. A golden lion is England. A white lion is Mortimer, which is Edward IV’s descent. A black lion is Flanders.
What a sign was for
A population that could not read could be told, at forty feet, in the dark, exactly whose land they were standing on – by the colour of an animal on a board.
That is what a pub sign was. It was not decoration and it was not branding.
It was a legal and political statement about ownership and allegiance, and everybody who walked past understood it perfectly, and it has not done that job for four hundred years and it is still hanging there.
The two theories
The first: James VI of Scotland became James I of England in 1603, and the red lion rampant is the royal badge of Scotland – and he is said to have ordered it displayed on buildings of importance.
The Prat has spent five hundred and ninety-four articles being careful about exactly this, and the evidence for a specific proclamation is thin, and the claim is repeated everywhere and sourced almost nowhere.
The second: John of Gaunt, whose badge was a red lion, and who was the wealthiest magnate in fourteenth-century England – the son of one king, the father of another. A tavern on his land flew his badge.
Exactly as we established at the Mitre, where a bishop’s hat meant you were drinking on church land.
The honest answer
Both, and neither, and mostly something duller.
A lion is easy to paint. It is instantly recognisable at forty feet to somebody who cannot read. It means power, and it means nothing in particular, and it is the commonest charge in European heraldry by an enormous margin.
And once a name is common, it becomes commoner – because a landlord choosing a name reaches for one that people already know how to find.
Verdict
Fine pub, cheap pint, honest number.
Go. There are five hundred and ninety-nine others.
Rampant, passant, couchant
Which is the vocabulary, and which is worth thirty seconds because it is on every sign in the country.
A lion rampant is standing on one hind leg, clawing the air. It is aggressive. It is what Scotland has.
A lion passant is walking, one paw raised, looking forward. It is what England has – three of them, on the royal arms, since Richard I.
A lion couchant is lying down.
And the posture is as much of the message as the colour. A red lion rampant is Scotland asserting itself. A lion couchant is a family saying something considerably more modest.
Every one of those signs is a sentence, and nobody has read one in four hundred years.
Harper Thames is a comedic writer exploring modern life through irony and subtle exaggeration. Rooted in student perspectives and London’s cultural landscape, Harper’s work focuses on relatable humour grounded in everyday experience.
Expertise is developed through writing practice and critical engagement, while authority comes from authenticity and consistency. Trust is reinforced by transparent satire and ethical humour choices.
