A history of The Typography Workshop — 

In 1984, after 250 years of cutting type and making printing presses, the type founding firm Stephenson Blake & Co. Ltd announced the closing and selling of their foundry. This announcement led to Alan Kitching and his business partner at design studio Omnific, Derek Birdsall to purchase some of the last type and presses ever produced by the foundry, among others. In 1989, Alan decided to “go and print” on his own and purchased the collection for his own from Derek and set up The Typography Workshop in its original home of Clerkenwell, London.

The Typography Workshop was set up by letterpress icon Alan Kitching in the late Eighties to be used as an experimental typography workshop, taking letterpress away from its traditional repetitive use of book printing, and creating new ways to explore typographic expression within the parameters of the printing process itself. Kitching established the workshop as an integral element of the national design scene ever since, creating some iconic work there and now at his home workshop just down the road in Kennington.

The collection of fonts held at the workshop is quite simply fantastic. From Caslon Old Face to Futura and everything in between, in both metal & wood type — ranging from 6pt to 600pt! The collection is a brilliant array which shows off the rich history of type design from both British and overseas type foundries.

The heritage attached to the workshop is inimitable, having been purchased from the type foundries in their closing years as some of the last ‘new’ letterpress equipment made and retained as a whole collection all these years. I am now in the extremely fortunate position to have taken over this space (creative haven) and continue the legacy of The Typography Workshop and letterpress into the future, adding my own take on the 500 year old process as I do so.