What is the Watney’s font?

Watney’s brewery might have disappeared but its brand lives on in the collective memory and people often ask “What is that font?”

The post-war Watney’s brand identity was created by the Design Research Unit. They were commissioned by Watney’s in 1956 and eventually delivered a pioneering House Identification Manual in around 1960.

This guidance included comprehensive rules on which lettering styles to use, for which purposes, in which contexts.

So, there’s problem number 1: there is no single lettering style but rather a whole set of different, complementary ones.

Problem number 2 is that these weren’t ‘fonts’ in the 21st century sense.

This is a bit boring, and tends to bring out the pedants, but here’s a quick summary of the terminology as we understand it:

• typeface – related sets of letters and numbers in different sizes and weights, like Gill Sans, which comes in bold, condensed, italic, shadowed, and so on.
• font – a specific style of a particular typeface, such as 12 point Gill Sans Italic. In the days of traditional printing, this would be a single set of metal letters.
• lettering style – a design for a set of letters and numbers that might not be used in print at all but cast in metal or plastic, cut from wood, or hand painted.

The meaning of ‘font’ has changed, however, so that, these days, it usually means a digital file you install, such as Roboto_Black.ttf (a TrueType font), which can be automatically resized.

And what most people want to know when they ask about a font is which one they should buy or download for their computer.

With that in mind, throughout this piece, we’ll suggest some digital fonts that will get you close to those used by Watney’s, even if they’re not exactly the same.

The information in this post comes from two Watney Mann in-house technical manuals, House Identification Manual and Basic Elements.

We’ve seen pages from these reproduced in other books and online but were very kindly sent complete scans by Nick Stone, AKA TypeJunky, to whom we owe several pints.

The font in the Watney’s Red Barrel logo

The famous Red Barrel logo has the word WATNEYS written across its centre in a style the manual calls Grotesque No. 9.

This style could also be used for, e.g., signs pointing to the toilets, or the lounge in a pub. But, in practice, that doesn’t often seem to have been done.

It was also allowed to be used for pub signs in specific circumstances – see below.

There are digital versions available.

The brand name font

The style used to write WATNEYS was described in the brand manual as Clarendon Bold Expanded. But no other font by this name actually looks like Watney’s version, which is sort of curvy and almost cartoonish.

There is, however, a modern digital font called ‘Freehouse’ designed specifically to mimic Watney’s lettering. That’s what we used for the image at the top of this post.

This style was also used to write the names of subsidiary breweries such as Bullard’s, Phipps, Usher’s, Wilson’s, tying together the various companies that were added to the Watney’s family as the 1960s went on.

The fonts used for Watney’s pub signs

A common complaint about Watney’s was that their pubs, and the pubs of breweries they took over, all looked the same. In fact, there were a range of different lettering styles for pub signs, with some loose guidelines for which should be used for which brand, in which parts of the country.

In London, Watney’s own pubs used a style described as English Two-Line Antique, somewhat similar to Egyptian Italic and, to a lesser extent, Festive. It’s a 19th-century-style italic slab-serif that absolutely reeks of post-war Britain.

The closest digital font we can find to this is Antique No 6 Black Italic from Commercial Type but, oof, it’s not cheap.

An alternative was ‘Thorowgood Italic’, another 19th century slab-serif revived at around the time of the Festival of Britain. There’s a digital version of this available at a much more reasonable price.

Two plainer serif styles were also available: Clarendon, of which there are many digital versions, and something called ‘Modern No. 1 Wide’ for which we can’t find an exact match, but it’s in the Modern/Scotch family.

Finally, the red barrel logo font, Grotesque No. 9, was given as an option only for pubs “having narrow fascias” – because its letters are themselves relatively narrow.

Watney’s typography on packaging

We don’t have copies of the manuals for this but grab any Watney Mann beer label or promotional item and you can see the same lettering styles being applied, with similar rules.

Handmade, not digital

If you want to recreate the Watney’s look for your own project – a beer label, say, or a sign for the pub in your shed, consider how you’ll avoid the digital look.

Digital fonts can be a great place to start. But back in the 1960s, signs were painted or cut by hand by craftsmen who painstakingly transferred the letter styles from manuals and pattern books.

This meant they were often subtly wonky or misaligned, with a somewhat organic feel.

And printed labels had ink bleed and other characteristics that gave them texture. There are lots of tutorials on this, like this from Spoon Graphics.