Why are horse brasses a pub thing?

Ask someone to describe the décor of a traditional pub and they might well mention horse brasses. Horse brasses are yellow-metal plates or plaques originally used to decorate horse harnesses. In pubs, they’re often nailed to the wall or displayed on black leather straps known as ‘martingales’. But why have they historically been a go-to item for the pub designer and decorator? According to the National Horse Brass Society the “pendant type” of horse brass most often seen in pubs became popular after about 1850 when a firm in Walsall began mass producing them so that carters could make their working horses look as fancy as the carriage horses used by aristocrats. How horse brasses came to end up decorating pubs rather than horses can be tied to the replacement of working horses by motor vehicles. This is from our 2017 book 20th Century Pub: Post-First World War Britain was a very different place. Technology, culture and art seemed to have leapt forward. During the war years, cinema as…