Why are so many pubs called the Bell?

The short answer

A Bell is a church sign. Where the name is old, the pub is usually within sight of a tower, and where the name carries a number — Five Bells, Six Bells, Eight Bells — that number was once the number of bells hanging in it. Our census of OpenStreetMap on 10 September 2026 counted 130 pubs called the Bell or the Old Bell across the United Kingdom and Ireland, thirteenth of the twenty names we counted, and the atlas drawn on 20 September maps all 130 of them.

It is also the strangest name on that map. Taking 53.5°N as the line between north and south, 17% of all 3,878 pubs in the atlas stand above it. The Bell manages one.

A name as old as the habit of naming

The Bell is among the earliest English inn names to survive in a document under its own name. A deed of 1453, in the reign of Henry VI, gives the name of a house in the parish of St Bridget in Fleet Street, in translation, as “Savage’s Inn” or “the Bell on the Hoop” — the house later famous as the Belle Sauvage. The doubled name is the interesting part. A hoop was a garland of ivy, the bush hung out to tell a street that drink was ready, and it is the oldest advertisement in the trade; here it is sharing a signboard with a bell. Two sign traditions, one building, 1453.

By CAMRA’s count in 2007 the Bell was still the ninth commonest pub name in Britain. Our own figure is much lower because we match the name exactly, in two forms only: a Bell Inn is not counted here, and neither is a Blue Bell. That is a choice about counting and not a claim about pubs, and it matters later on this page.

Why a bell, though

Because it was the loudest thing in the parish and it belonged to everybody.

The National Churches Trust counts about 6,100 churches with three or more bells hung for change ringing, of which more than 5,700 are in England — a concentration with no equivalent anywhere else. More than half of those towers hold six bells and about a third hold eight, which is the whole explanation for why Six Bells and Eight Bells are the numbered forms you actually meet, and why Twelve Bells is a rarity.

The ringing itself is younger than the bells. Full-circle change ringing, in which each ringer swings a bell right over and controls the moment it speaks, evolved in England in the seventeenth century: the phrase “ring the changes” turns up in a sermon of 1614, ringers had worked out all 120 orders available on five bells by 1640, and the first manual, Tintinnalogia, was published in 1668 by Richard Duckworth with Fabian Stedman, who followed it with Campanalogia in 1677. The Central Council of Church Bell Ringers credits those books with spreading the practice out of its first centres in London, Cambridge and Norwich. Better bell tuning in the eighteenth century then put more bells in more towers. So a great many Bell signs went up in exactly the period when a parish was likely to be adding to its ring and talking about it.

The pub that counted the bells next door

The numbered names are unusually honest documents, because they record a fact that later changed.

The Ten Bells in Spitalfields was the Eight Bells Alehouse in 1755, when Christ Church next door had eight. The church installed a new set of chimes in 1788, this time of ten, and insurance records have the house registered as the Ten Bells, Church Street, Spitalfields, from 1794. The tower went on to twelve and then back to eight after a fire in 1836, and the pub stayed at ten. The Six Bells in St Michael’s Street, St Albans, is a seventeenth-century timber-framed house named for the bells of the medieval St Michael’s church; it took the name in the eighteenth century, when the church had six, and the church has more than six now.

That is the pattern worth carrying around: a numbered Bell dates the tower at the moment of naming, and then goes quietly out of date while the sign stays up. It is a rare case of a pub name that can be checked against an independent record — the churchwardens’ accounts and the bell frame itself.

On this site, the Eight Bells at Chipping Campden carries the other kind of story. The inn and CAMRA both date it to the fourteenth century, and the tradition is that it lodged the masons who built St James’s church and stored the bells that gave it its name. It is a good story and it is told in the town. Historic England lists a seventeenth-century Cotswold ashlar building with mullioned windows and an inglenook, three hundred years short of the claim, and the county historic environment record holds no entry for the inn at all. The passage through to the courtyard and the great hearth are real; the fourteenth century is tradition.

Ringers’ ale

There is a plainer link between the tower and the bar, and the churchwardens wrote it down.

At Chagford in Devon, the accounts of the parish record money spent on “ale when the little bell was put up” and on “expenses in ale when the beam was put up in the tower”, and later entries pay a named man directly: in 1728, five shillings to Edward Pinson for beer for the ringers on the 11th of October, and in 1758 a bill of his for ale, paper and candles. An Edward Pinson kept the village inn from 1745. That house is now called the Ring o’ Bells and appears in earlier records as the Bells and the Six Bells, and the local history society’s reading is that its name comes from ringing ale — the drink the parish bought for the men who had been hauling on ropes for two hours. It is difficult to think of a more direct reason for a pub to be named after a church.

Bells were also made, and made here. The Whitechapel Bell Foundry cast bronze bells in London from 1570 and was the oldest manufacturing company in Great Britain when its Whitechapel premises closed on 12 June 2017; the Liberty Bell came out of it in 1752 and Big Ben was recast there in 1858. The building is listed grade II*. A bell on a sign was a picture of something English workshops actually produced, which is part of why every sign painter could draw one.

Old Bells you can still drink in

Ye Olde Bell and Steelyard at Woodbridge in Suffolk is grade I listed, which is rare for a small town pub. CAMRA dates it to about 1540; Historic England reasons from the street, since New Street was laid out in 1550, and takes that as the probable date of the inn. The beam weighing machine that juts over the pavement is a seventeenth-century addition and was still being used to weigh hay waggons within living memory in 1947.

The Bell Inn at Nottingham has the best-dated fabric of any Bell on this site: a timber frame read at about 1420 behind a Georgian front, with rock-cut cellars beneath. Its earliest written reference as an inn is a bequest of 1638. The Bell at Aldworth on the Berkshire Downs claims 1340 and stands in a former hall house that Historic England dates to the fifteenth century or possibly earlier; the same family has run it since the eighteenth century and the ebony handpumps went in in 1902. The Olde Bell at Hurley keeps the boldest claim of them all, 1135, as the guest house of the Benedictine priory across the lane, and kept an 890th birthday in 2025. No licence or record supports the year, and the tradition is old and well loved; we grade it accordingly, on the scale set out in our methodology.

The Old Bell at Rye shows why the record has to be asked. CAMRA gives it a fifteenth-century date, and a Rye historian working from the town’s own papers in 1847 listed the inns trading there in the middle of the eighteenth century — the Bull Head, the George, the Fortune, the Dolphin, the Lyon. No Bell. The frame may well be late medieval; nothing yet dates it, and nothing records drinking there in the 1400s.

The line at 53.5°N, and what we cannot tell you

Back to the oddity. One of the 130 mapped Bells stands north of that line: the Old Bell on Royal Parade in Harrogate, at 53.99°N. Every other one is south of a parallel that passes above Manchester and below Leeds. No other name in the atlas is anything like as lopsided.

We checked the obvious answer, which is that the north uses a different form of the name and our exact matching drops it. Counting Great Britain from OpenStreetMap on 20 September 2026, with the same method: a Bell Inn or Bell Hotel, 105 pubs, of which 2 are north of the line; the numbered Bells from Three to Twelve, 91 pubs, of which 1 is. So the strict forms of the name are southern together. But a Blue Bell or Bluebell gives 104 pubs with 42 north of the line, and a Ring o’ Bells gives 23 with 7. Those two lean the other way.

That reframes the question rather than answering it. Bell pubs are not missing from the north; the north calls them something else. Why the bare Bell, the Bell Inn and the numbered Bells stop at that line while the Blue Bell and the Ring o’ Bells flourish above it, we have not found anything that explains, and we are not going to invent a reason. The figures above count what is mapped and one set of spellings, which is the same limit that applies everywhere on our page of pub-name counts. If you know of a study of it, we would like to read it.

What a Bell is worth as evidence

The name dates nothing by itself — houses took it in the fifteenth century and in the nineteenth. What it does is tell you exactly where to look next: the parish church, its ring, its frame and the churchwardens’ accounts, which are among the best-kept and least-read documents in England. A numbered Bell is better still, because the number is a claim somebody can check. How that evidence is weighed against a pub’s own account of itself is set out in how historians date an old pub, and the rest of the visual vocabulary is in pub signs and what they mean. A Bell at least points at one building; a George points at two men fourteen centuries apart, and a New Inn points at a house that has usually gone.

Sources

Found something wrong?Suggest a correction