Mystery house plaque

[Banterlope]

I have a small plaque on the front of my house and occasionally people stop and point and talk about it. It's a very old terraced house in a fairly large Suffolk village but nothing special to look at. I have sometimes thought about going out and asking them what it represents/means but alternate between thinking the questions makes me sound ignorant or a bit nuts. Or both. Or perhaps it suggests we're swingers/satanists/easy to burgle? I have attached a cropped/lo-res image in case anyone knows about this sort of thing. You ideas would be appreciated, it's been bugging me for years.

Fire insurance :-)

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_insurance_mark

Yes fire insurance from the days you had to pay for a fire brigade of sorts to come and put out your fire.

Gosh that is interesting! I had not heard of those before.

I believe it is an old insurance plaque (for when you had to buy fire insurance and display the plaque on the outside of your house to show you were insured. If it caught fire they would look for the plaque and put out the fire). Looks like a Royal Sun alliance one.

very interesting! http://www.stokesleypride.org.uk/html/sppoiifireplaque.shtml

Before the national fire service began, householders could pay a private ‘fire-brigade’ company to come in the case of a house fire. The plaque is to identify that this house was a customer of a particular firm, so they would come and put the fire out. If you didn’t, they would let it burn! Every firm had different designs, yours was probably called something related to ‘Sun’. You can probably find it on the internet.

Amazing, thank you for your replies. I have attempted to google it in the past but typing 'small sun thing on my house' didn't really hep

Wow there are so many knowledgable peeps on MN. Threads like this make me realise why I'm still here

Thanks for the link above. The sun represents Royal Sun Alliance Group, interesting

Amazing!

Yes, I work for RSA and it's definitely one of the old SunAlliance fire plaques. We have lots of these dotted around the office.

They often come up in auction houses and on TV shows like Bargsin Hunt/Flog It. Depending on the condition/design/rarity factor they go for sell around £30-50.

Oh lovely. I've never noticed those anywhere before.

You all beat me to it!!