Bratislava – Old Town Hall (Golden Rose Inn sign from 1719)
It’s not often that you see a pub sign in a museum and assume, incorrectly, that it was designed last Thursday for a high-end florist with delusions of grandeur. Actually, seeing pub signs in museums outside of the UK isn’t something that I really see much of at all, especially when the sign is over 300 years old. But this one, the Golden Rose Inn sign, looks I think unnervingly modern (well, with a retro tinge of course) for something that dates from 1719. I might have even believed someone who told me it was a logo proposal for a craft beer bar in Shoreditch, although typing that has made me sad about the disappearance of Goose Island from the area. But I won’t digress.
The pub sign is made from hammered iron, copper and bronze, and it once swung proudly over a pub on what’s now Jesenského Street in Bratislava, but which for a while was called Golden Rose street after the venue. The pub, of course, is long gone, but the sign has survived, improbably, through war, empire, revolution, regime change and, perhaps most dangerously, the temptation of being melted down during a metal shortage. That it’s still here at all feels a minor miracle, or at least the result of one very determined preservationist who didn’t want it ending up as part of a drainpipe.
Pub signs themselves are a particularly enduring form of public communication, visual anchors in towns where literacy was never guaranteed but drinking always was. From Roman taverns with their bunches of grapes to medieval English inns hung with animals, crowns and celestial saints, these signs were never just decorative. They were wayfinders, storytellers and social cues, an invitation to step inside and forget the weather, taxes or whatever royal war was being waged that week.
There’s something comforting in the idea that local residents in Bratislava would have walked under this sign and known exactly what it meant, namely warmth, rest, a drink, and probably the same gossip repeated for the fifth time that day (not that I associate pubs with gossip of course). And if nothing else, it proves that even in 1719, someone knew that branding mattered, as well as the need for a drink. I liked this sign because of what it represented, all really rather lovely.
