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

Tristan Hotham · Researcher of campaigns and platforms · 2026

The national favourites

The most common names are badges more than descriptions. A Red Lion, White Hart, Swan or Bull began as a heraldic sign people could recognise without reading. The Crown, King's Head and Royal Oak are acts of loyalty. The Plough and the Wheatsheaf belong to farming, the Railway and the Coach and Horses to transport. Click any bar to map that name.

Names are normalised: "The Red Lion Inn", "Red Lion Hotel" and "Ye Olde Red Lion" all count as Red Lion. Themes are my own rough grouping by keyword. Many names carry more than one history, so read them as a guide, not a rule.

The traditional sign is mostly an English and Welsh habit. About 41% of English pubs and 34% of Welsh pubs have a name in one of these themes. In Scotland the figure is 16%, where bars are more often named after a place, a street or an owner.

The names that give a county away

Common names are everywhere. The local ones are more interesting. For every county I found the common name (40 or more pubs in Britain) that is most over-represented there compared with Britain as a whole. A few are famous. The Black Bull belongs to the north, the Bay Horse to Yorkshire, the Talbot to the West Midlands and the Cricketers to the Surrey and Hampshire downs, where the game grew up. Mining counties have their Miners Arms.

Back to the old name

Old names are only as complete as the mappers who added them, so this is a sample, not a census of renamings.

Method

1. Pubs are every OpenStreetMap feature tagged amenity=pub in Great Britain with a name, downloaded through the Overpass API in October 2026. Bars, restaurants and hotels not tagged as pubs are not included.
2. Names are lower-cased and stripped of "The", "Ye Olde", and trailing "Inn", "Hotel", "Tavern" or "Pub". A short list of spelling variants is merged, so "Plow" counts as Plough and "Granby" as Marquis of Granby.
3. Each pub is placed in a ceremonial county (England), preserved county (Wales) or council area (Scotland).
4. Distinctiveness is the location quotient: a name's share of a county's pubs divided by its share of all pubs in Britain.

OpenStreetMap is very complete for pubs in most of Britain, but it is a snapshot of pubs open or recently open, mapped by volunteers. Closed pubs that kept their names on houses are not here.