Short Story: Twynersh
Pub names are often a public record of the obvious: The Ship for a port town, The Bricklayer's Arms for a new estate. But occasionally you find a name that makes you stop and think. "Twynersh," a contender for my nearest pub, has that effect. It’s a strange word that doesn’t easily roll off the tongue. The building itself looks more like a railwayman’s cottage than a purpose-built pub.
It turns out the name is a small piece of linguistic archaeology. This local word is a corruption of the Old English for a "double meadow" or "twin pasture." This small patch of land sits in a fork between two waterways: the River Bourne and the Abbey River. The name itself is a fossil, preserving a map of the landscape as it was a thousand years ago. There’s irony here. The pub now serves a community that grew around the vast, flooded gravel pits of the 20th century. Yet it carries the name of the very meadows that were scraped away to create modern London.
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