Granby

Granby is a sans-serif typeface designed and released by the Stephenson Blake type foundry of Sheffield from 1930. Granby is influenced by a contemporary British sans-serif design, the Johnston typeface or Railway Alphabet (1916), the proprietary face of what became London Underground, and Gill Sans (1928) which had recently been released and become popular. Roy Millington's history of Stephenson Blake also cites Futura as an influence. Like both Johnston and Gill Sans, Granby has an upper-case influenced by Roman square capitals and a lower-case inspired by traditional "old-style" serif letters, making it an example of what is now called the humanist style of sans-serif fonts. Granby's regular style is a robust design bolder than conventional body text fonts, making it suitable for headings and posters and also for legible text at smaller sizes. Granby resembles Johnston with diamond-shaped dots (tittles) on the 'i' and 'j' and a wide ‘a’. A difference is its ‘g’, a ‘single-storey’ design influenced by handwriting. According to Mike Ashworth of Transport for London, London Transport itself made some use of Granby by the 1960s due to the limited availability of Johnston type.