How about "The Bung Hole" It provides some humor to the story and then you can tell the history of the name. Whiskey is aged in barrels. The hole in which they fill and empty the barrels is called a bung hole. True story.
In a sonnet I wrote several years ago, I mention a pub that got shut down. Its name was "The Honky Tonk". I dig BMacKay40's suggestion though.
Bars somewhat local to me: J.D. Cooper's Cask and Flagon The Lucky Dog Banner Someplace Special The Chickering Hope this helps! ~~SP
I favour such bar names as Slug and Lettuce, and Mash and Barrel. One of my stories features a fictitious bar that I am positioning in the East End of London, and was previously calling it The Smoking Barrel; due to shotgun carrying gangsters shooting dead the pub landlord during the 1960’s, but am now in two minds about.
When I took my dad, who is quite deaf, to The Fellowship of the Ring and they mention the Inn of the Prancing Pony my dad, who has this perverse way of making up stuff he can't hear, thought the name was Raunchy Parrot. Go figure, anyway it gave me a good laugh!
Actually there is a pub called 'The Slug and Lettuce.' I don't know if this will create any issues. It's in Lincoln, England. The reason I know this is, I used it as a setting for a short film. I wrote the screenplay for the film and 'starred' in it. On a more practical note, why not just type in pub UK in a search engine and see what comes up.
I used to name my pubs the Cracked Flagon till someone told me it was already in several other books. The Taverns may have caught fire.
Firstly - I seem to have run on much longer than I planned. I'm far too much of a bore on this subject! Apologies in advance. You may need to stop for a pie and a pint before you get to the end. These days a lot of traditional pub names have been lost as, much more so since the Monopolies and Mergers Commission forced the big breweries to relinquish ownership of vast numbers of their chains, allowing various leisure businesses to acquire them: The "Slug and Lettuce" is a recent invention for a chain of pubs of the same name that has spread across the country from London over the last twenty years. Similarly the various "Firkin" pubs ("Hare and Firkin", "Dog and Firkin", "Ferret and Firkin" etc. etc. are a chain sired by the successful "Goose and Firkin" in Southwark, which have taken over old pubs and rebranded to fit the new corporate themes. It's sad when an accountant snaps up a traditional pub and kills the old name in order to give it an irrelevant new one, like "Rat and Parrot" or "Mad Moose". It happens nationally, and it happens locally. Here in Norwich the owner of the hugely successful "Fat Cat" pub (itself a name change from "The New Inn", as it must have been in 1868) has bought and renamed several traditional boozers and rebranded them in his preferred spit-and-sawdust real ale theme. The latest, for a long time named "The Mustard Pot" due to its proximity to the old Colman's Mustard factory, is now "The Fat Cat and Canary" in a nod to both the old movie and the nearby ground of Norwich City F.C. Where a pub can avoid the ignominious fate of being pointlessly renamed (why on Earth would a new licensee rename "The Iron Duke" to "The Duke of Wellington" or "The Garnet Wolseley" to "The Sir Garnet"?) and can keep its ancient identity, there is often a treat of historical fun to be found. We have a pub in Norwich called "The Stanley" which bears a painted image of Laurel and Hardy on it's sign, but was named for Henry Morton Stanley in 1890. "The Red Lion" is so called because its owners supported the family of John of Gaunt and displaying his coat of arms was a declaration for him against the king, Richard II, whose own coat of arms gave rise to many of the houses of his supporters becoming pubs named "The White Hart". "The Cat and Fiddle" might allude to Richard III's murder of Edward V, whilst "The Hog in Armour" refers to his coat of arms. One of my favourites is that part of south London which takes its name from the inn where Katherine of Aragon rested on her journey before crossing the river to marry the heir to Henry VII's throne. The peasantry of Southwark were unable to pronounce El Infanta de Castille, and so, over five hundred hers later, we have "The Elephant and Castle". Another favourite is a Norwich pub originally named "The Light Horseman", but which had a sign that was painted so badly it suggested a braying donkey instead of a dragoon and his horse. The old Norfolk dialect for a singing donkey was Barking Dickey, and so the pub became known in the 19th century. Imagine a backstory for your locale, or a mood you want to create, whether you want to counter or exaggerrate a cliche: the desolate pub in An American Werewolf in London might have been more likely named "The Woolpack" in the real world, but that would hardly serve as well as "The Slaughtered Lamb" in setting the tone of the movie. History, industry, agriculture, folklore, politics, dialect, geography and just about anything have contributed to the naming of British pubs. Above all, if you're creating an old, traditional pub, I think its story would be local. P.S. If "The Moon and Sixpence" is the well-known one in Tintern, I believe it changed to that name in the early twentieth century after Somerset Maugham stopped by, and the landlord liked his book… which inspires all kinds of fictional possibilities! A pint of mild in "The Death Star", anyone?
Euphemisms and double entendres are a nice feature of many pub names, I think. There's a pub in, I think, Staffordshire, called "The Bird in Hand." It's commonly known as "The Swinging Tit" because of the old pub sign, which features a bird that might possibly be construed as swinging on the finger of a woman's extended arm. That the woman is largely naked, and her arm only partially covers the profile of a rather pronounced breast, speaks to an altogether different inspiration.
Quite a few named after famous Admirals and Generals: Nelson, Wellington, Sir John Borlase Warren (2 with that name locally). A lot of generic names to use: "The Kings Head", "The Crown", "The Star", "The Victoria". Is it near a railway, river or canal?
Going back to The Pig . . . The Pig and Whistle had a lot of cash of myself in my youth, as did The Candlesticks, as did The Ivy House as did The . . .
In my younger days, I used to frequent a place called the "Drift Inn" even though it didn't have any rooms for rent.
Shouldn't it be "t'Hole In t'Wall"? Just wondering why one of the definite articles would be elided, but not t'other?
As an Irish person, I can tell you that most pubs just use a name i.e. "O'Toole's Pub" or "Mickey's Pub" or something.
