Pub Signs
Is it me or is the traditional Pub Sign disappearing , the amount of pubs that now have no sign or a sign that instead of a picture (traditional , modern or humourous ) just has the pubs name / food / beer seem to becoming more popular . I like the old signs they give you a clue to where the pubs name came from be it Heralidic / Local Legend/Industry / Person , theres more to a name than just a name .
Theres a Man with a Mullet going Mad with a Mallet in Millets !
I agree with you Oggwyn. Perhaps its a case of real art costs money so get a signwriter to to a quicker and cheaper job. Sounds like a bad case of bean counters influence to me.I can think of a number of Marstons pubs with just the name on a black background. A case of corporate identity ? Boring or what. You would have thought that the fact of people liking a bit of variety would have entered the minds of these corporate poeple. But no, everything has to be the same. See a pub sign of a certain colour and you know its design,beer,snacks and menu before you have crossed its threshold.
An original style pub sign has no place in the mind of these people Its all about Identity, they don't realise they are designing out that very thing.
They're definitely disappearing from what I can see, although looking at old photos of pubs a lot of late 19thC/early 20thC pubs only had names no pictures, so this kind of penny pinching has a long history. I've taken to photographing the signs a bit more than I used to (when I remember). Oddly enough the first thing Brakspears showed our party visiting the brewery was the artists studio.
A few years ago, Greene King started a programme of replacing its pictorial pub signs with a standard design using a glorified version of its logo and the pub name underneath.
Quite rightly, protests grew as the traditional pub signs started to disappear and eventually this deadful corporate re-branding exercise was quietly dropped.
You can still see some of these monstrosities about, but thankfully most have now been replaced with... something quite like what they took down in the first place!
Yes, the new Greene King signs are an odd comprimise between a traditional picture and the company's corpoate logo. I've attached a picture of one such sign - The Jolly Sailor in Poole. As you can see, they haven't even bothered with the pubs name, opting for their phone number instead. Still, it's an improvement on what they had before.Originally Posted by rpadam
In London, Fullers and Young's are two breweries who consistantly provide excellent signs for their pubs. I wish more would follow their lead.
Here, for comparison, is the grim offering which thankfully Greene King seem to be in the process of replacing.
Well that is one way to get the phone number on our site
It certainly feels like to me that there are less pub signs. There is definitely something about them that works for me, I remember knowing all the pub signs in Bath from walking through the town as kid, well before I became interested in pubs, there was just something different and enjoyable about them.
We always welcome pictures of pub signs on the main site, they are something that I think should be recorded wherever possible.
The George IVth in Lichfield has replaced the pub sign picture of George IV, with a written 'George IV', which looks cr*p to be honest - mind you, they have done the whole place out like a trendy bar, with candles and sofas etc, which looks equally as cr*p.
MILD:
I know what do you mean.. the sign with darkish red with white text "George IV" written over it. I remember old sign with George IV's portrait it looked much better than current..
J.D Wetherspoon =Home of Hoppy: The Silk Kite, Tamworth.. http://www.tamworthblog.co.uk/2009/0...-blogs-review/
Mind you, George IV was a tw*t - they should rename it, the Charles I, as there was no head on the beer
MILD:
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