How many are there?
Britain has more pubs called the Red Lion than any other name, and the reason there are so many is heraldic rather than royal: a red lion rampant was the commonest beast on the arms of the families who owned the land the inns stood on. Our own count of OpenStreetMap, made in September 2026, found 474 pubs named exactly that across the United Kingdom and Ireland.
The published figures run higher. A 2025 analysis by Bionic, working from UK phonebook data, counted 517 pubs called the Red Lion across the UK and Ireland, up from 468 in 2023 — a rise which says more about how such counts are compiled than about anybody opening new Red Lions. Arundel Museum, which has looked at the question from the local end, puts the figure at over 600. A separate industry count of more than 58,000 pubs also found Red Lion at the top.
None of those three says what it counted, and none can be run again, which is why we counted ourselves and wrote the query down: 474 pubs named exactly the Red Lion, from OpenStreetMap. That is lower than the published figures mostly because the name has to match exactly — a Red Lion Hotel is not counted, and neither is an Old Red Lion.
Whichever number you take, the Red Lion has been Britain’s most common pub name for as long as anyone has been counting. What comes next is less settled than it is usually stated: on our count the Royal Oak is second at 391 and the Crown only sixth at 246, behind the Swan and, unromantically, the Railway. Against a national stock of roughly 45,000 pubs in 2024, that means better than one pub in a hundred is a Red Lion.
Why pubs have names at all
The habit begins with a sign rather than a name, and the sign begins with a legal duty.
Roman inns in Britain — tabernae — hung out bunches of vine leaves to show that wine was available, and the practice never really stopped. Medieval English alehouses used an ale-stake: a pole projecting over the street, hung with an ivy garland or a bush when a fresh brew was ready. The bush is why the Bush is still a pub name.
In 1393 a law under Richard II required drinking houses to display a sign, on pain of forfeiting their ale. The purpose was regulation and taxation rather than decoration: the authorities needed to know which houses were selling. A house without a sign was a house outside the system.
Because most people could not read, the sign had to be a picture, and it had to be a picture people could name reliably from the far end of the street. From the late Middle Ages until the mid-nineteenth century, when literacy was still patchy, it was the sign that gave the pub its name rather than the other way round. This is the single most important fact about pub names, and it explains almost all of them: they are things that are easy to draw, easy to recognise, and hard to confuse with anything else. A lion. A bell. A crown. A swan. Three horseshoes.
Where the red lion comes from
A red lion — in heraldic terms, a lion rampant gules — is one of the most widely used charges in English and Scottish arms. That is the real answer, and the two famous stories are refinements of it.
The John of Gaunt story. Gaunt, third surviving son of Edward III and the most powerful magnate in late fourteenth-century England, is often credited with the red lion as his badge, and inns on his extensive estates are said to have displayed it. World History Encyclopedia gives this as the origin of the name. Arundel Museum is more sceptical, pointing out both that the evidence is thin and that Gaunt was unpopular in his own lifetime, which makes him an odd figure for innkeepers up and down the country to advertise.
The James VI and I story. The other favourite is that when James VI of Scotland became James I of England in 1603, he ordered that the red lion of Scotland be displayed on buildings of public importance, including inns, as a mark of the new union and of his own authority. The royal arms of Scotland do indeed carry a red lion rampant, and 1603 is exactly the sort of moment that produces mass renaming. But no such order has been produced, and Arundel Museum’s assessment is that this explanation, like Gaunt’s, has little evidence behind it.
The unromantic explanation, and the one that best fits the geography, is that the red lion was simply the commonest heraldic beast available. It appears in the arms of a great many English families across many counties — aristocrats, landowners, local lords — and an inn on or near an estate had every reason to display the arms of the family that owned the land, licensed the trade or provided the custom. Multiply that by several centuries and several hundred families and you get five hundred Red Lions without needing a royal proclamation at all.
That also explains why Red Lions are spread evenly across the country rather than clustered where one duke’s lands were. They are not all copies of the same lion.
The other lions, and the rest of the menagerie
Heraldry accounts for a large share of British pub names, and once you know that, the signs start reading like a coat of arms rather than a zoo.
The White Hart is one of the oldest of all pub names, and its origin is unusually well attested: a white hart — a pale male red deer, genuinely rare — was the personal badge of Richard II, who reigned from 1377 to 1399. Pubs took it up in his reign and never let it go. You can drink under it at the White Hart Inn in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket and at Ye Olde White Harte in Hull.
The Crown — the second most common name — simply signalled allegiance to the monarch, which was a prudent thing for a licensed house to do. The Crown Inn at Chiddingfold in Surrey and the Old Crown in Birmingham are both among the older claimants on this site.
The Royal Oak is the third, and it is a political statement with a date attached: it commemorates Charles II hiding in an oak tree after the Battle of Worcester in 1651, and became safe and then fashionable to display after his restoration in 1660. The Royal Oak in Winchester is one example of many hundreds.
Then there are the plain lions and bulls of local arms: the Lion Inn high on Blakey Ridge in the North York Moors, Ye Olde Bulls Head Inn in Beaumaris, the White Lion Inn in Llanelian-yn-Rhos, and the Red Lion at Chalton in Hampshire, a thatched Downland pub that dates itself to 1147.
Religion supplied another whole class of names before the Reformation and lost most of them afterwards. The Cross Keys are the keys of St Peter, from the papal arms. Black Friars referred to the Dominicans, from the colour of their habits. The Salutation is the Annunciation — the archangel Gabriel saluting the Virgin Mary — which is what Nottingham’s Ye Olde Salutation Inn is named for. When Henry VIII broke with Rome the more obviously papal signs became a liability, and Pope’s Head pubs were frequently and swiftly renamed King’s Head — one of the neatest examples anywhere of political weather visible in ordinary street furniture.
Trades and traffic did the rest. Coach and Horses told you what happened in the yard, and the name spread with stagecoach travel from the seventeenth century. Fox and Hounds and Horse and Hounds marked where a hunt met. The Drovers stood on a livestock route.
Does a common name mean a new pub?
No — and this is the useful part for anyone trying to date a pub. A Red Lion can be any age, because the name was available in every century since the fourteenth and was applied enthusiastically in all of them. The name tells you almost nothing about the age of the business and nothing at all about the age of the building.
What names do help with is spotting a change. Pubs were renamed constantly: on a change of owner, a change of regime, a change of use, or a rebuild. Ye Olde Fighting Cocks in St Albans was the Round House and then the Three Pigeons before it was the Fighting Cocks. Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem was the Pilgrim in 1751 and does not appear under its present name until 1799. When you find a name change in the record, you have usually found a moment when something real happened to the premises — which makes the old names more useful evidence than the current one.
So: the Red Lion is not one story repeated five hundred times. It is five hundred separate decisions, made over six centuries, mostly for the very ordinary reason that a red lion was the beast on the local landlord’s shield and everybody could draw it.
If you want to know how much weight to put on a pub’s own account of its name and age, our methodology explains how we grade claims against records. There is more on the pseudo-medieval spellings that so many of these signs carry in our guide to what “Ye Olde” actually means, and you can browse the oldest claimants in Britain in the top 100 oldest pubs and on our page for England’s oldest pubs.
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