New pub sign leaves drinkers scratching their heads after historic blunder

A pub firm have been accused of making a ‘schoolboy error’ when they replaced a swing sign hanging outside one of its inns in Kent. As part of a spruce-up, Admiral Taverns recently removed the old sign at The Eight Bells in Canterbury, which featured a maiden with eight Canterbury bells, the flowers the historic pub is named after. They then replaced it with a sign featuring eight church bells hanging in Canterbury Cathedral’s Bell Harry Tower.

Not only is the pub not named after the cathedral bells, there aren’t actually eight of them hanging from the Bell Harry Tower. ‘It’s a schoolboy error,’ Kent pub history expert, Rory Kehoe, told Kent Online, ‘because the fact is that Bell Harry only houses one bell, which it is named after, not eight. ‘The artwork of the new sign suggests that if one stands under the tower (at the crossing of the nave with the transept) and looks up, lots of bells are visible.

‘But not so. Even Bell Harry is out of sight, as it’s actually mounted on the roof of the tower.’. He said the cathedral’s main ring of 14 bells is hung in the SW (Oxford) Tower, with the other six bells located in the NW (Arundel) Tower. He added that he was relieved the pub’s long-serving landlady Kim Truelove still has the old sign, whose design is thought to stem back to 1908, when The Eight Bells was a tied house within the estate of Canterbury’s Ash’s Dane John Brewery.

Kim said she’d asked Admiral Taverns for the old sign to be restored when the front of the pub was having a spruce-up. But the area manager told her this wouldn’t be possible and gave her two new designs to choose from. She said she felt obligated to agree to one of them, but was sad to lose the old sign, which ‘customers loved and has so much history’. Kim said the new sign is ‘very nicely done’ but doesn’t fit the pub.

She told the Metro today Admiral Taverns – which owns more than 1,600 pubs – have now said they ‘have it in hand’, which she hopes means they’ll soon be putting the old design back up. The Metro has contacted Admiral Taverns for a comment. Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk. For more stories like this, check our news page. Arrow MORE: Say goodbye to frizz and flyaways with Typebea’s new styling range (and get 20% off!).

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