Pub names are public property. Change them, and you blot out a bit of local cultural history.
In Aberystwyth, the Grade II listed White Horse in upper Portland Street is not only architecturally wonderfully idiosyncratic but uniquely named. It’s the only pub in the town with three names: Rae’s Bar Lounge, White Horse Hotel and The White Horse.
The Rae’s segment, dating from about 1900 and named after the then owner, John Rae, is magnificent, the name spelt out in original glazed art nouveau lettering, above a curved engraved window (in plastic, sadly, after the original got broken). A fine glazed depiction of a rearing white horse on a green ground, and a run of original glazed green and brown wall tiles, completes the exterior decoration.
Spectacular in a different way is the golden-and-black-painted cast-ironwork lettering of the hotel sign parapet above the main entrance. Elegant windows, including curved glass, are continued along the frontage and round the corner into Terrace Road.
The integrity of this long established piece of townscape is threatened by people who think they can improve it. They can’t, and Ceredigion planners shouldn’t let them foul up any part of this building by pointlessly trying.
The pub’s owners want permission for new internally-lit signs, which sounds dubious aesthetically, as well as being informational overkill, it being perfectly obvious this is a pub and what its names are.
The town council, meanwhile, is pushing for the owners to “consider using the Welsh name, ie Y Ceffyl Gwyn". In principle, that may sound like a good idea. In practice, it’s the opposite. Pub names are part of an historical backcloth which we tinker with at our peril, partly because doing so weakens in a small but real way the security offered by place undisturbed. This is particularly so at the moment, when the value of continuity at a time when so many certainties - climatic, financial, social - are slipping away looks like an imperative.
In recent years, the pub was embarrassingly relabelled the Varsity. The mistake was fairly quickly realised and the original name restored. Take this as a cautionary tale.