I’ve not stacks of detail about the where and when of this one, but I passed a local Brewers Fayre the other day and was struck by the not insubstantial sign. I’d not noticed the change itself but was pretty flabbergasted, a key element of the design is a pan lid.

A pan lid.

Goodness me, and a pretty awful oddly shaped and angled pan lid, with some stylised steam of some type. These sit onto of some text.

A PAN LID LOGO!

Crikes.

For those unaware, Brewers Fayre are a chain of around 120 pubs selling British “pub grub”. Its simple, basic food, you don’t feel it’s fresh of full of local provenance, but it’s cheap enough. And anyone unlucky enough to need to have breakfast after staying at a sister brand Premier Inn hotel will attest to the quality of the food production (with baked beans once described by a colleague of mine as a “slice of beans”). There’s something Lenny Henry didn’t mention.

The brand has undergone massive changes and restructuring of late, but one wonders what they were thinking with this pan lid design, the old logo was simple and a touch base but it did the job, the new one is just chuffin’ awful. And this from parent company Whitbread, who own the achingly successful, style conscious but somewhat ever generic Costa.

I find it tricky to look past the lid I’m afraid, but I’m not overly convinced by much of the rest. The steam doesn’t seem to match the lid, or the letters and the letters themselves are thick friendly looking things but one questions the lowercase f in “fayre” and the overlapping of the same letter to the text above.