Tristan Hotham

Researcher of campaigns and platforms. Maker of other things.

What pub names remember

A green and gold hanging pub sign reading What Pub Names Remember, beside a list of Britain's commonest pub names led by the Red Lion with 531

A pub sign is a small public monument. I grouped every named pub in Great Britain in OpenStreetMap by name, 37,559 pubs in all, to see which histories the signs still carry and which names give a county away.

Map any pub name

Badges, loyalty and the road

The Red Lion is Britain’s commonest pub name, with 531, then the Crown (450), the Royal Oak (405) and the White Hart (298). The top of the list is made of badges more than descriptions. The red lion was the badge of John of Gaunt, and the white hart the personal badge of Richard II. The Crown, the King’s Head and the Royal Oak are acts of loyalty. The Royal Oak remembers the tree at Boscobel where the future Charles II hid after Worcester in 1651. Farming has its Plough and Wheatsheaf, and the transport ages have the Coach and Horses and the Railway.

Bar chart of the twenty commonest pub names in Great Britain coloured by theme: Red Lion 531, Crown 450, Royal Oak 405, White Hart 298, Plough 274, Swan and White Horse 262, Railway 261, down to Star 148
“The Red Lion Inn”, “Red Lion Hotel” and “Ye Olde Red Lion” all count as Red Lion. Themes are a rough keyword grouping.

The long tail is just as telling. 36% of pubs have a name that no other pub in Britain shares. The traditional sign is also mostly an English and Welsh habit. About 41% of English pubs and 34% of Welsh pubs carry a name from one of these themes, against 16% in Scotland, where bars are more often named after a place, a street or an owner.

The names that give a county away

For every county I found the common name, one with 40 or more pubs in Britain, that is most over-represented there. The Black Lion is 15 times commoner in Dyfed than nationally. The Talbot, the hound badge of the Talbot Earls of Shrewsbury, is 14 times commoner in Worcestershire. The Cricketers belong to Surrey and Hampshire, where the eighteenth-century game grew up. The Black Bull belongs to Northumberland and the Bay Horse to North Yorkshire. Derbyshire and Cumbria have their Miners Arms, and Norfolk, where Nelson was born, has the most Lord Nelsons.

Map of Great Britain with each county coloured by the theme of its most over-represented pub name, labelled with names such as Black Bull, Bay Horse, Talbot, Cricketers, Black Lion and Miners Arms, and a table of the most distinctive

Back to the old name

OpenStreetMap mappers have recorded a former name for 1,103 pubs. Among the old names are the usual Red Lions and Railways, but also 1990s and 2000s chain brands such as Hobgoblin, Tap and Spile, Last Orders, O’Neill’s and Varsity. Many pubs rebranded in that era have since gone back to an older-sounding name. This is a sample of what mappers happened to note, not a census of renamings.

The interactive page lets you type any name, from the Eagle and Child (the Stanley crest, and so very Lancashire) to the Marquis of Granby. It shows every pub of that name on a map and shades the counties where it is commonest.

Explore the interactive map
Data and code on Zenodo

Sources

  • Pub data © OpenStreetMap contributors, Open Database Licence, downloaded through the Overpass API in October 2026.
  • Boundaries: Office for National Statistics. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right. Open Government Licence.
  • Data and code: GitHub, archived as doi:10.5281/zenodo.23676495.
  • AI use: written with drafting, data and coding help from Claude (Anthropic).

Tristan Hotham