Henry Alfred Wadworth, the Bartholomew family and an 1885 tower.

Wadworth has brewed in the Wiltshire market town of Devizes since 1875. English Wikipedia says that in that year Henry Wadworth bought the Northgate Brewery in the town and founded Wadworth & Co. The company names him in full as Henry Alfred Wadworth and says the business then passed to his founding partner, John Smith Bartholomew. It has stayed with the Bartholomew family since: Wadworth says it is now in the fifth generation of Bartholomew ownership, with Toby Bartholomew leading the company as managing director.

The business soon outgrew its first premises. English Wikipedia says that in 1885 Wadworth moved to a new tower brewery close to the original site, and the company describes this as its 1885 brewery at Northgate. The tower is a Grade II-listed building, Toby Bartholomew said when the company announced its new brewhouse.

Horses were part of that picture from the start. BBC News reported in February 2025 that shire horses had worked from the Northgate site since 1885, that the brewery had more than forty at one point, that most had to be sold during the Second World War, and that four were brought back in 1974. The horses were, in the BBC’s words, a well-known sight around Devizes.

Six crosses, a cooper’s shorthand and a centenary brew.

The flagship ale is 6X, which Wadworth says was first brewed on 5 December 1923. The name comes from the cellar. The company explains that coopers used to mark casks with whitewashed crosses to show a beer’s strength, and because this ale was originally 6% it was marked with six of them. Wadworth’s cooper, Reg Morris, shortened the six crosses to a 6 followed by a single X, and the name stuck once the barrels were stored behind the bar in full view. Wadworth says the strength was cut to 4.3% because of the rationing of raw ingredients during the Second World War, and later to 4.1%.

The centenary in 2023 was celebrated all year, the company said, ending with a special 6% edition that recreated the original 1923 recipe with Fuggles and Goldings hops and a traditional invert sugar. That recreation, sold as 6X 1923, returned in 2024 and again in 2025, Wadworth says.

The packaging had already been modernised. The Morning Advertiser reported in April 2017 that Wadworth had redesigned all seven of its bottled beers, including 6X, 6X Gold and the golden ale Horizon, with modern, colourful labels that still reflected the brand’s heritage, alongside a campaign titled “Old Cool is the New Cool.” Elaine Beckett, then head of marketing and communications, told the paper the new look was meant to reach younger drinkers without alienating existing customers.

One craft has not changed. Wadworth says it keeps in-house sign writers who hand-paint all of its pub signs. The company says it runs more than 140 pubs across the South and West of England.

Design and documentation.

The seven brewers in this group are all English regional and family names: St Austell, Timothy Taylor, Marston’s, Wadworth, Hook Norton, Black Sheep and Harvey’s. Most of them are Victorian or older. John Marston set up in Burton upon Trent in 1834, English Wikipedia says; Hook Norton dates from 1849 in the Oxfordshire village of the same name; Walter Hicks founded what became St Austell Brewery in Cornwall in 1851; Timothy Taylor began brewing in Keighley in 1858 and moved to Knowle Spring in 1863, the company says; and Wadworth has brewed in Devizes since 1875. Harvey’s of Lewes dates itself to 1790. Black Sheep is the newcomer: English Wikipedia says Paul Theakston set it up in Masham in 1991, after his family’s brewery in the same town had been taken over.

Their ownership has gone in different directions. Several still describe themselves as family businesses: Timothy Taylor says the brewery remains in the Taylor family; Wadworth says it passed from Henry Wadworth to his founding partner John Smith Bartholomew and is now in the fifth generation of Bartholomew family ownership; Hook Norton’s managing director James Clarke is a fifth-generation descendant of the founder, John Harris, according to an interview with The Morning Advertiser that the brewery republishes; and Harvey’s says it has been in the custodianship of John Harvey’s descendants since 1790. St Austell says it was founded as a family-owned company, and on 1 July 2016 it bought Bath Ales, English Wikipedia says. Marston’s went the other way: in 2020 its brewing business joined Carlsberg’s UK arm in the Carlsberg Marston’s Brewing Company, Carlsberg bought out Marston’s remaining stake in July 2024, and since January 2025 the breweries have been part of Carlsberg Britvic, according to English Wikipedia. Black Sheep entered administration in May 2023 and was bought by the London investment firm Breal Capital, The Caterer reported on 31 May 2023; in January 2026 its owner, Keystone Brewing Group, was sold in a pre-pack deal to the newly formed Great British Drinks Company, The Caterer reported on 22 January 2026.

A brewer’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a pump clip, a name and the town it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands or changed how and where it brews. Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the brewery says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its beer is brewed and how its pump clips and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A new identity in 2023, a new brewhouse and the end of the drays.

Wadworth refreshed its corporate identity at the start of 2023. In a January 2023 announcement the company said it had worked with the branding agency Holman Group on a new logo using a new serif typeface, chosen to convey the heritage of the business with an edge of modernity. Blue remained central but was softened, and a broader palette would nod to beer’s four ingredients — water, hops, yeast and barley. The identity added the line “Traditions worth holding on to” and gave “Since 1875” a more prominent place, the company said.

The same year brought a change of address. Work on a new brewhouse on Folly Road, on the edge of Devizes, began in May 2022, the company says, and the new brewery opened in September 2023, BBC News reported. Toby Bartholomew said the Northgate brewery had become too large, inefficient and inflexible for the business. Folly Road also gave its name to a new range of craft beers. The first, a session IPA called Evolution, came in packaging designed by Gemma Cook, an Arts University Bournemouth student who won a design competition Wadworth launched at the end of 2022 to name the new brewery and design its logo and first two beers, the company says. In November 2022 Wadworth exchanged contracts with the developer Backhouse on a large part of the Northgate site for around 100 homes, keeping the listed brewery tower, the company said.

The move ended one tradition. BBC News reported on 18 February 2025 that Wadworth had stopped its horse-drawn deliveries, saying new stables were “no longer viable due to the escalation in build costs and complexities of the site,” and that its last two shires, Sam and George, had gone to a new home in Wales. The brewery marked its 150th anniversary later in 2025.

For a design guide, Wadworth shows how a cooper’s chalk mark can become a product name, and how a family brewer can modernise a serif and a blue without dropping its painted pub signs. Compare Shepherd Neame, another long-established family brewer in the south of England, and Adnams, the Southwold brewery bought by the Adnams brothers in 1872. For this guide we use Devizes blue, barley gold and hop green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Wadworth’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.