Devizes, Wiltshire

Letter set (3)

Back before Christmas, I was finding examples of the various kinds of letters found on English buildings of the 18th and 19th centuries. My last example, inspired by a recent visit to Stroud in Gloucestershire, was of the Egyptian letter, with its slab serifs. Here's another type, the clarendon, in which which those serifs are linked to the main strokes with a little curve, to make the whole letter less blocky. These huge letters on the sign of the Bear Hotel in Devizes are some of the biggest I've sen recently – there is absolutely no mistaking the identity of this building, and the huge size of the sign means that I can blow it up with ease so that you can see the little curves clearly on the T, E, and L.

Clarendons also work well on a much smaller scale and are often used on the cast metal signs bearing the names of streets. Although thousands of these old cast signs have been replaced by less attractive plastic ones (on the grounds of saving repainting costs, presumably), there are quite a few still around. SIgns on the gigantic scale of the Bear Hotel, forming a stripe right across the front of the building, are also quite unusual these days, although the Victorians had a liking for them, often covering commercial buildings with big signs of all sorts. The proliferation of advertising and similar signs is nothing new – but at least painted signs like this one show more care and flair than modern plastic ones.