Derby in the English Midlands, where I was born and raised, is an industrial city, famous in the past for its locomotives, and in the present for Rolls Royce aero engines. In my lifetime, an awful lot of its old buildings have been knocked down, even the ancient church of St Alkmund’s, swept away with its graveyard to make room for the new inner ring road. But it still has a lot of old pubs: The Dolphin Inn, for example, dates back to 1580. So the fact that The Noah’s Ark pub is two hundred years old is hardly noteworthy. What is pretty interesting though, is how it got its title. It’s not named after ‘the illustrious first navigator,’ as one Victorian local historian phrased it. It’s named after a locally famous character called Noah Bullock who had a house on that site, back in the seventeenth century.
Continue reading “Sunday Whatever – What’s in a name by Michael Bloor”
