Smith and Whistle sounds like a venerable Victorian partnership. It is a modern invention, and a clever one.
Smith and Whistle Bar and Terrace holds three hundred and seventy reviews and a 4.4, and its name is a fine example of a modern trick: the invented name deliberately built to sound like a venerable old firm, a partnership of two long-dead gentlemen.
The fake old partnership
“Smith and Whistle” has the exact ring of an old-established business – the kind of “So-and-So and So-and-So” name that suggests two partners who founded a firm generations ago and whose names have been over the door ever since. Think of the great real examples: Fortnum and Mason, Marks and Spencer, Fuller, Smith and Turner. The “X and Y” format signals heritage, reliability, a business with roots and a history.
Smith and Whistle borrows this ring entirely, and – as far as one can tell – invents it. There was, in all likelihood, no Mr Smith and no Mr Whistle. The name is a modern creation, deliberately constructed to sound like a Victorian partnership, to lend a contemporary bar the instant patina of age and establishment that a genuine old firm’s name carries.
Smith, the everyman name
The choice of “Smith” is telling. Smith is the most common surname in the English-speaking world, derived from the blacksmith – the smith being one of the most essential and universal of all trades in every village and town. It is the ultimate ordinary, everyman English name, and it lends the invented firm an air of solid, honest, unpretentious Englishness.
Pairing it with “Whistle” – a slightly whimsical, unexpected word – gives the name character and memorability, lifting it above the merely generic. “Whistle” adds a touch of the playful and the distinctive, while “Smith” grounds it in solid English ordinariness. The combination is carefully judged: familiar enough to sound real, distinctive enough to be memorable.
The manufactured heritage
This is part of a whole modern movement in bar and restaurant naming: the manufacture of fake heritage. In an age that prizes authenticity, craft and history, a great many new venues reach for names, decor and stories that suggest age and tradition they do not actually possess – the invented old firm, the manufactured speakeasy (which we met at The Back Room), the brand-new bar dressed as a Victorian survival.
The Prat notes this with amused tolerance. There is something a little paradoxical about manufacturing heritage – about a brand-new bar pretending to be old – but it is also a harmless and skilful game, and the pleasure of a well-made faux-heritage name is real enough. Smith and Whistle plays the game well: the name is convincing, characterful and memorable, and does exactly what it is designed to do.
The bar
A well-regarded bar and terrace, part of a grand Piccadilly hotel, doing a solid 4.4 across a fair sample, trading on a cleverly invented name that conjures a Victorian partnership out of thin air.
Verdict
Well-rated and cleverly named, after two gentlemen – Mr Smith and Mr Whistle – who almost certainly never existed.
Have a cocktail, and raise it to the imaginary founders, whose fake old partnership is a small, skilful piece of manufactured English heritage.
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]
