A bar in Chelsea called the Chelsea Bar, rated by twenty-five people, and a lesson in how not to name a venue
The Chelsea Bar is a bar in Chelsea called the Chelsea Bar. It has twenty-five reviews and a 4.2, and it is a small case study in the difference between an honest name and a useful one.
Honest, but useless
We praised 3 Henrietta Street, back in the Covent Garden survey, for the honesty of naming itself after its own address. And we stand by that. But there is a line between honest and generic, and the Chelsea Bar has stepped over it.
“3 Henrietta Street” is specific – there is only one, it identifies the exact spot. “The Chelsea Bar” could be any of hundreds of things. It tells you the neighbourhood, which you already knew, and nothing else. It is a name that has declined to make any decision at all.
The Prat’s naming desk, which has now assessed the names of some hundred and forty London drinking establishments, ranks “the Chelsea Bar” near the bottom – not because it is dishonest, but because it is inert. A name should either describe, evoke, or intrigue. This one does none of the three. It simply locates.
The twenty-five
Twenty-five reviews is not a sample – it is a handful, and the 4.2 attached to it tells you almost nothing, as we have argued in roughly every article of this survey.
But there is a deeper point here about names and discoverability. A generic name is a discoverability problem. Search “Chelsea bar” and you get every bar in Chelsea, and this specific venue is buried among them. A distinctive name – the Grenadier, the Phene, Borshtch ‘n’ Tears – is instantly findable, instantly memorable, instantly its own thing. A generic name condemns a venue to a kind of permanent obscurity, which may be part of why it sits on twenty-five reviews while the Cadogan Arms up the road sits on nearly two thousand.
The lesson
A name is the cheapest and most powerful marketing a venue will ever have. The pubs in this survey with the strongest identities almost all have vivid, specific, memorable names – and the ones struggling for attention disproportionately have flat, generic, locating ones.
The Chelsea Bar may well be perfectly good. We cannot tell from twenty-five reviews. But it has made its own life harder by choosing a name that does nothing but point at the pavement it stands on.
Verdict
Possibly fine, impossible to judge, and saddled with a name that has quietly guaranteed it will be hard to find and easy to forget.
The paradox of the generic name
There is one defence of the generic name, and it is worth stating fairly. A name like “the Chelsea Bar” is doing a specific, if crude, kind of search engine optimisation. When someone types “Chelsea bar” into a phone, hoping to find a bar in Chelsea, a venue with exactly that name has a chance of surfacing near the top.
But this is a weak strategy, and it usually backfires. The search results for “Chelsea bar” are dominated by listings, aggregators and the sheer number of bars in the area, and a single venue with that literal name tends to drown rather than rise. Distinctiveness wins in the end – people search for what they remember, and nobody remembers “the Chelsea Bar.” They remember the pub where the ghost owes money, or the one the mad doctor built. A name is a memory hook, and a generic name has nothing to hook onto.
Verdict
Possibly fine, impossible to judge, and saddled with a name that has quietly guaranteed it will be hard to find and easy to forget.
If you go, and it is good, tell people the name. It needs the help.
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]
British people: masters of saying true things while maintaining complete deniability. This violates that tradition. Refreshing.