This is about some of the data I uploaded to Github last week, but it deserves a short post of its own. In the 17th century, many business premises were identified by sign boards with a picture painted on them, and were known in speech and writing by a phrase that described the picture, such as ‘The White Bear’. It’s important to remember that these signs could identify almost any kind of premises. It was only later, after other businesses stopped using them, that they came to be particularly associated with pubs. This dataset is a list of 249 of these building signs from addresses in and near London, taken from the accounts of horses contributed on the Propositions. This is a small dataset compared with some of the other data I’ve uploaded, but it’s a fairly large sample of signs compared to the few that can be extracted from other sources I know of, and I think it should be safe enough to treat it as if it’s a random sample. There’s plenty of scope to analyse the iconography of these signs either quantitatively or individually. What were the most popular colours and symbols? What meanings did they have besides identifying the people and businesses that occupied a building? What’s the story behind ‘The Dog’s Head in Pot’, which was the name of not one but two buildings in London?