Shaston is the old name for Shaftesbury in Dorset, revived by Thomas Hardy for his novels – a literary borrowing in the district of writers
The Shaston Arms holds a 4.4 from seven hundred and eighteen people, and carries a name that most drinkers will not recognise but which hides a genuine literary connection: Shaston is the old, poetic name for the Dorset town of Shaftesbury, and it was revived and popularised by Thomas Hardy.
Shaston and Hardy
Shaftesbury, the hilltop town in Dorset, was known in medieval times as Shaston – a contraction of its older names. The name had largely fallen out of use by the nineteenth century, when Thomas Hardy, constructing his fictional version of the English south-west, revived it.
Hardy set his novels in a semi-fictional “Wessex,” a landscape based closely on the real Dorset and its neighbours but given old and altered names – and Shaston, the ancient name for Shaftesbury, appears in his work, notably in Jude the Obscure, as a place of significance. Hardy took a forgotten medieval name and gave it back a literary life, so that “Shaston” now carries a distinctly Hardy-esque flavour of old, rural, tragic Wessex.
The literary borrowing, in the right district
There is something fitting about a pub with a buried Hardy reference sitting near Bloomsbury, the great literary district. Where the Bloomsbury Group borrowed the intellectual glamour of the area’s writers directly, the Shaston Arms does something subtler – it carries a literary allusion that most of its customers will never decode, a small buried treasure for the reader who happens to know their Hardy.
The Prat’s literary desk notes that this is the most rewarding kind of pub name: one that works perfectly well as a pleasant, slightly archaic-sounding word for anybody, while carrying a genuine layer of meaning for the few who recognise it. Most drinkers hear “Shaston” as simply an old English name; the Hardy reader hears the whole tragic weight of Wessex.
The connection to Shaftesbury Avenue
There is a neat coincidence here too. The bar sits near Shaftesbury Avenue – and while the avenue is named after the Earl of Shaftesbury, the philanthropist, rather than the Dorset town, the echo is pleasing: Shaston is the old name for Shaftesbury the town, and here it sits beside Shaftesbury the avenue, the two Shaftesburys nodding at each other across the centuries.
The bar
A 4.4 across seven hundred people is a solid, real-sample score. The reviews describe a good, characterful Soho pub doing an honest trade – the literary allusion entirely optional, the pint entirely reliable.
Verdict
A good Soho pub carrying Thomas Hardy’s revived old name for a Dorset town, a buried literary treasure that most drinkers will never notice and a few will treasure, fittingly close to the literary district.
Hardy and the pub
There is a further fitness to the Hardy connection. Hardy’s novels are full of pubs and inns – the rural alehouse is one of his recurring settings, a place where his Wessex characters gather, gossip, court, and come to grief. He understood the pub as the true social centre of English country life, the place where the community’s dramas played out over ale.
So a pub named after a Hardy place-name is honouring not just the writer but his deep affection for exactly this kind of institution. Hardy would have approved of a Shaston Arms, provided the beer was good and somebody in the corner was quietly heading for tragedy.
Verdict
A good Soho pub carrying Thomas Hardy’s revived old name for a Dorset town, a buried literary treasure that most drinkers will never notice and a few will treasure, fittingly close to the literary district.
Go, have a pint, and if you know your Hardy, raise it to Wessex; if you do not, enjoy a pleasant old word for a name and lose nothing at all.
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]
My mum’s been in London since the 50s. Says you’ve captured something essential. Right.
Someone thinking the countryside would have better governance. It doesn’t. It’s identical everywhere which is somehow worse because there’s no escape.