Why are so many pubs called the Ship?

The short answer

The Ship is a trade sign. Where most of the common pub names are somebody’s badge — a lion, a hart, a crown — a ship is a picture of the thing the customers built, crewed, loaded or lost money on, hung up in a place where everybody in the room could name the rig on sight. Our census of OpenStreetMap on 10 September 2026 counted 81 pubs called exactly the Ship in the United Kingdom and Ireland, nineteenth of the twenty names we counted; Pubs Galore, counting differently in 2019, put the Ship tenth at 244. The gap between those two figures is method rather than pubs — ours matches the name exactly, so a Ship Inn or a Ship Hotel is not in it — and the smaller number turns out to be the more interesting one, because of where its dots fall.

The loneliest name on the map

The pub-name atlas positions those 81 houses from OpenStreetMap on 20 September 2026, and one measurement separates the Ship from every other name in it. The typical Ship has its nearest namesake 18.0 km away. For the Red Lion the figure is 7.0 km, for the Swan 7.5 km and for the Crown 9.2 km. No other name we mapped is spread as thinly.

That is what a coastal name looks like when it is measured. Crowns and Red Lions were given out parish by parish across a filled-in country, so they sit evenly; harbours are strung round the edge of an island with long empty stretches between them, and a name that follows harbours inherits the gaps. The atlas shows the same thing in reverse for the Railway, which bunches at 8.3 km because it followed lines and junctions rather than coastline.

The caution is that our matcher takes the name exactly, in two forms, and the sea is full of the ones it drops: a Ship Inn, a Ship Hotel, a Ship and Anchor, a Ship and Shovell, a Sloop, a Smack, a Lifeboat. So the dots are a sample of the habit rather than a census of it, and they are honest about one thing only — where pubs called precisely the Ship are, and how far apart.

The ark that became the ship

There is a second explanation for the name, older and harder to check.

A church’s main space is its nave, from the Latin navis, a ship, and the comparison of a congregation to a vessel is as old as the architecture. From that comes a claim repeated in most popular accounts of pub names, including The History Press’s survey and the Wikipedia article that cites it: at the Reformation, houses with obviously Catholic signs quietly changed them for something close in meaning but safe, so a St Peter became the Crossed Keys and an Ark became the Ship.

It is a good explanation and it is worth being plain about its state. Neither account names a single house where the change from Ark to Ship is recorded, with a date and a document, and we have not found one either. What is certain is that religious signs did fall away after Henry VIII’s break with Rome, and that a ship was an image with a Christian reading available to anyone who wanted one. Treat it as plausible and unproven rather than as the origin of your local Ship, and if you find the deed that shows it happening, we would like to see it — the same standard we apply to a pub’s own date, in our methodology.

When the sign is a portrait

Some Ships are not generic at all. They are one vessel, and that makes them datable in a way almost no other pub name is.

The Prospect of Whitby on the Thames at Wapping was the Pelican, then the Devil’s Tavern, and took its present name after a fire early in the nineteenth century, from a Tyne collier registered at Whitby that berthed beside it carrying sea coal from Newcastle to London. By about 1826 it was trading as Manns Prospect of Whitby. Its own marketing reaches back to 1520; Historic England’s public history notes that references to that date do not appear until the 1950s and may have belonged to a marketing campaign rather than to research, and the statutory list entry — grade II, first listed on 29 December 1950 — carries the 1520 as something said, while everything it can see for itself is Georgian or later.

The Mayflower at Rotherhithe has been through the whole cycle. CAMRA dates a house called the Shippe here to 1780; it was later the Spread Eagle and Crown, and it was rebuilt and renamed for the ship of 1620 in the late 1950s, after bomb damage, with a mock-Tudor interior of 1957. Three names, one jetty, and the oldest of them is the plain one.

The Ship and Shovell off the Strand shows how quickly a portrait turns into a pun. It occupies two former terrace houses of 1731–33, listed grade II since 1970, which traded as two separate pubs — the Ship and the Shovell — until their cellars were joined by a tunnel under Craven Passage in 1998. Even the name is contested: it is said to honour Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell, and it is also said to come from the coal labourers who used the nearby Coal Hole. Nobody has settled it.

Ships you can still drink in

The Ship Inn at Porlock, known in the village as the Top Ship, stands where the street starts to climb Porlock Hill and advertises itself as a thirteenth-century coaching inn. Two registers read it independently and reach the same century as each other, and it is not the thirteenth: Historic England lists it as an inn of the sixteenth to seventeenth century, probably a three-room cross-passage house, enlarged in the early to mid nineteenth; the Exmoor National Park Historic Environment Record, monument MSO10692, describes an inn of sixteenth- or seventeenth-century origins with a cross passage. Thatch, half-hipped at one end, and a sixteenth-century core CAMRA thinks worth noting — all real, and three centuries short of the claim.

The Old Ship Inn at Perth is named for water that has gone. It sits off the High Street at the Skinnergate and dates itself to 1665, when ships still tied up at the foot of the street. Historic Environment Scotland’s listing covers the tenement range at 21–31 High Street, which takes in the inn’s own number: four storeys and an attic, stuccoed, shops at street level, and dated 1774 at the gable to George Street. The walls the bar occupies are a century younger than the year over the door, and 1665 stands as the pub’s own until a deed turns up.

The Ship Inn at Irvine stands on Harbour Street beside the Scottish Maritime Museum, with a ship’s mast built into the bar. CAMRA’s Ayrshire branch dates the building to 1595 and the drinks licence to 1754; the Wikipedia article on Irvine Harbour says 1596 and the same licence year. Neither cites a record, and a search of the national designations within a hundred and twenty metres of the house on 17 September 2026 returned no entry for the Ship at all, so nothing surveys this fabric. The licence date of 1754 is the useful number, and it is the one that keeps the house out of our Top 100 by earliest record.

A little further round the coast, the Sloop Inn at St Ives names a rig rather than a ship. It is reputed to date from about 1312; Historic England lists it grade II and describes a low, L-shaped house of the seventeenth to eighteenth century in colourwashed granite rubble under a half-hipped slate roof. John Hobson Matthews, writing the parish history from the borough’s own records in 1892, calls it an old inn on the Wharf and declines to date it, in a chapter where he dates the neighbours from their inscriptions.

What a Ship is worth as evidence

Less than nothing as a date, and a great deal as a direction. Three questions follow a Ship sign, and all three lead to paper. Which water is it on, and who kept the harbour records? Was there a ship of that name, and when was it registered, wrecked or broken up — because a house named for a particular vessel cannot be older than the vessel, the same hard floor that makes the Railway the most informative sign on any street. And what was the house called before, because a Ship in a place with no water is usually a renaming, and a renaming is a dated event in somebody’s ledger.

How those answers are weighed against a pub’s own account of itself is set out in how historians date an old pub, and the wider vocabulary of the boards is in pub signs and what they mean. For a name that points at a badge rather than a trade, start with the Swan; for the other sign that names a tool people worked with, see the Plough.

Counts and positions here are from OpenStreetMap, © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database Licence.

Found something wrong?Suggest a correction