There are hundreds of them. This one has a 4.4. Nobody has ever asked why the swan is white.
The White Swan is one of the most common pub names in England. There are hundreds. You have been in one. You will be in another.
This particular one holds a 4.4 from two and a half thousand people, and it is a perfectly good Covent Garden pub, and nobody who has ever drunk in it has asked the obvious question.
Why is the swan white
Because it is heraldry, and in heraldry the swan is almost always white, and it belonged – among others – to Henry IV, to the de Bohun family, and to the House of Lancaster.
A pub displaying a white swan in the fifteenth century was not decorating. It was declaring an allegiance. In a country that was, at various points, extremely serious about which badge you had over your door, the sign was a political statement that could be read by an illiterate population at a glance.
That is what pub signs were for. Not charm. Identification, and loyalty, in a world where most people could not read the name.
The swans themselves
Worth a paragraph, because the facts are extraordinary and everybody half-knows them and gets them wrong.
The Crown does have a claim over mute swans in open water in parts of England, and it is a genuine surviving prerogative, and it dates from a period when swan was a luxury food and the birds were counted, marked and owned.
Every July there is still a ceremony on the Thames called Swan Upping, in which swans are caught, checked, weighed, and released, by men in scarlet in wooden skiffs, and this has been happening for eight hundred years, and it is happening this year, and almost nobody in London knows it is going on.
The pub
Twenty to thirty pounds. Nicholson’s. Dark wood, decent range, good pies, two floors, permanently busy. It is genuinely nice and there is nothing whatsoever to say about it that has not been said about the Porcupine, the Round House, and the Clarence.
And that, after eight batches, is the finding: the great mass of London pubs are almost identical, they are almost all good, and the thing that distinguishes them is a name they inherited from a world that no longer exists and a story that nobody in the building has ever heard.
The other reason there are so many
Sign-painting. A white swan is easy to paint and easy to recognise from across a street at dusk, and for several centuries the pub sign had to work for a population that could not read and was frequently drunk.
This is why the most common pub names in England are almost all simple, high-contrast images: the Red Lion, the White Hart, the Royal Oak, the Crown, the Bell, the Swan. They are not names. They are pictograms, and the words came afterwards.
Every abstract, lowercase, one-word bar name in this survey – Muse, Setlist, Equus, Condesa – has forgotten this entirely, and has produced signage that is unreadable at forty feet and impossible to describe over the phone, which was the only job the sign ever had.
Verdict
Good pub. Very common name. Ancient badge. Go, have a pint, look at the sign, and know that you are standing under the heraldic device of the House of Lancaster and ordering a burger.
Official site: nicholsonspubs.co.uk
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]
Someone thinking the countryside has better governance. It doesn’t. It’s identical everywhere, which is somehow worse because there’s nowhere to escape to.