York, St Sampson's Square

 

Scene with cranes

As regular readers of this blog will have noticed, I’m rather fond of pubs decorated with tiles. There was a great fashion for tiled pubs in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, when pub owners liked the tiles’ wipe-down surfaces and their colourful appearance – if you’re offering hospitality, it pays to stand out on the street, to catch the attention of passers-by as well as locals. The Three Cranes in York’s St Sampson’s Square has a tiled ground floor that certainly fulfils the easy-care and easily spotted requirements, but it’s also clearly a popular place to gather. Rather than photograph the whole building, and a whole lot of people, I looked up at the beautiful tiled sign.

So here are the three cranes in their watery and reed-surrounded habitat, an elegant trio indeed. They must have been a satisfying job for whichever artist produced them at Doulton’s, say, or Minton’s or one of the other factories that produced architectural ceramics.

When I researched the pub’s history I got a surprise. It turns out, if a York Press article of the year 2000 is to be believed, that the pub goes back a long time. There was certainly a public house on the site in the 18th century – the sign is clearly a later addition and a photograph from earlier in the 19th century shows it with the same name but a sign without a picture. The same article says that the pub’s name does not derive from wading birds at all. Apparently the square in which the pub stands was once the city’s Thursday Market, where cloth was sold. A trio of wooden lifting cranes were installed to load and unload goods, and these are said to have given the pub its name.

The three birds, then, are a later reinterpretation of the name. But given my weakness for architectural ceramics and the sheer quality of this tiled sign, I for one don’t grudge this change from mechanical to ornithological.