The foundry bell rings no more at Stephen­son, Blake in Sheffield but at least part of the build­ing where Britain’s last great type­foundry oper­at­ed lives on.

Flats are being cre­at­ed in a devel­op­ment called Impact, named after the sans-serif type­face designed by Geof­frey Lee for Stephen­son, Blake in 1965. The com­pa­ny, which in its hey­day was unmatched in the world of type­found­ing, left its Upper Allen Street home of near­ly 200 years in 2006.

The his­toric build­ing, in the St Vin­cen­t’s con­ser­va­tion area with con­nec­tions stretch­ing back to William Cax­ton, Wynkyn de Worde and William Caslon, became a folorn sight. But today, as the con­ver­sion project moves on apace, the exte­ri­or is begin­ning to give off the swag­ger and con­fi­dence that it must have dis­played when near­ly 600 work­ers toiled to pro­duce met­al type as the firm, over five gen­er­a­tions, quashed its com­peti­tors to become dom­i­nant in Britain and the Com­mon­wealth. A sales office has opened on the large­ly 19th cen­tu­ry site offer­ing flats rang­ing in price from £115,000 to £228,000. When the scheme is fin­ished there will be a total of 152 pri­vate apart­ments, 36 with­in the old foundry, oth­ers new­ly-built on the site and with 50 neigh­bour­ing stu­dent flats already built. Matthew Hay­man, who is the lead­ing Sheffield city coun­cil regen­er­a­tion offi­cer for the area, told Small Print­er: ​“The Stephen­son Blake devel­op­ment is very much wel­comed in con­tribut­ing to the suc­cess of a con­ser­va­tion area by retain­ing the char­ac­ter of the build­ing. With new devel­op­ments and those in the pipeline with plan­ning approval we could see up to 6,000 new res­i­dents in the next 10 years.” There are plans for the old foundry build­ing to be on a her­itage trail link­ing with oth­er indus­tri­al con­ser­va­tion areas in that part of the city.

The younger peo­ple who will be the most like­ly inhab­i­tants of the Impact city cen­tre devel­op­ment may well appre­ci­ate the build­ing’s his­to­ry as the Impact type­face is a stan­dard fount on near­ly every per­son­al com­put­er in the world.

The Stephen­son, Blake build­ing, though less than half the size of the orig­i­nal as a result of demo­li­tion to save crip­pling busi­ness rates when the let­ter­press trade was strug­gling, is still impres­sive. Though not a list­ed build­ing, Sheffield city coun­cil recog­nised its his­tor­i­cal impor­tance and asked for an archae­o­log­i­cal sur­vey to be under­tak­en by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Sheffield before any con­ver­sion work went ahead. The sur­vey team pro­duced a pho­to­graph­ic record of the foundry, includ­ing pic­tures of cast­ing machines and the foundry’s then still-intact bell in the court­yard. The com­pa­ny was steeped in tra­di­tion and when it acquired HW Caslon in 1937, the Sheffield site was renamed the Caslon Let­ter Foundry to pre­serve the pres­ti­gious Caslon name.

It is remark­able that the com­pa­ny was still found­ing type for hand com­po­si­tion into the 1990s giv­en that Ottmar Mer­gen­thaler devel­oped the first line-cast­ing machine, the ​“Merg”, or Lino­type, in 1886 in the Unit­ed States. The more ver­sa­tile Mono­type machine fol­lowed. By 1915 33,000 Lino­type machines had been man­u­fac­tured. Nev­er­the­less, Stephen­son, Blake sur­vived a cen­tu­ry of strong com­pe­ti­tion with its old adver­saries Lino­type, Mono­type and Inter­type but all were final­ly beat­en by the new print­ing tech­nol­o­gy.

Stephen­son, Blake had become the last sur­viv­ing big foundry in Britain after a series of takeovers and had diver­si­fied, know­ing that demand for foundry type would fall. In the 1950s it expand­ed its wood­work­ing depart­ment to pro­vide a bespoke com­pos­ing room ser­vice, win­ning big Fleet Street con­tracts which includ­ed the relo­ca­tion and re-equip­ping of the Finan­cial Times in 1959 and in 1973 the com­pa­ny’s last big com­mis­sion: a new com­pos­ing room for the Sun­day Times and Times in Gray’s Inn Road. The com­pa­ny also joined a pho­to-set­ting con­sor­tium in Lon­don which served the adver­tis­ing indus­try and type­set the Dai­ly Telegraph’s then week­ly colour sup­ple­ment.

By the 1970s there had been a huge drop in demand for foundry type but there were still sub­stan­tial orders com­ing in from nation­al news­pa­pers into the 1980s where hot met­al sur­vived as unions resist­ed the new tech­nol­o­gy. Stephen­son, Blake sup­plied type for the finan­cial prices pages of nation­al news­pa­pers in Lon­don and Man­ches­ter where com­pos­i­tors with tweez­ers would night­ly change the share prices with foundry type, an oper­a­tion deemed more effi­cient for chang­ing the share prices than using mechan­i­cal set­ting. But by the 1990s, as com­put­erised dig­i­tal com­po­si­tion dom­i­nat­ed, let­ter­press was all but dead. It was time for the major­i­ty of the two found­ing Stephen­son, Blake fam­i­lies to quit. The his­toric punch­es, matri­ces, spec­i­men books and oth­er records were sold to the Type Muse­um in Lon­don in 1996. But the ven­er­a­ble firm was still not fin­ished. In 2000 Tom Blake, of the fifth gen­er­a­tion of the fam­i­ly, relaunched the com­pa­ny, cast­ing the hard zinc-alloyed Mazak type for hot foil block­ing and pro­duc­ing brass rule and asso­ci­at­ed mate­ri­als for the soft plas­tics indus­try. The wood work­ing depart­ment con­tin­ued, mak­ing muse­um cab­i­nets and humi­dors.

When Tom Blake retired in 2004 the busi­ness serv­ing the plas­tics indus­try was sold to busi­ness part­ners Ter­ry Lee and Steven Bond and Neville Buck­le, who had been with Stephen­son, Blake for more than 50 years, was their man­ag­er until his retire­ment two years ago. The wood­work­ing depart­ment was sold to Sheffield cab­i­net mak­er Har­ry Spur and in 2006 the new own­ers moved the plas­tics indus­try sup­ply oper­a­tion to anoth­er part of the city, Atter­cliffe, keep­ing the com­pa­ny name with a slight change: Stephen­son & Blake. Thus near­ly two cen­turies of Upper Allen Street his­to­ry came to an end. The com­pa­ny had been found­ed in 1818 by John Stephen­son, James Blake join­ing lat­er in the year to invest his £600 invest­ment from a lega­cy in his moth­er’s will.

Now the name of Impact will keep the foundry’s lega­cy to the print­ing world alive. And Geof­frey Lee’s cre­ation is still seen to have impact: the type­face has been adopt­ed for the logo of St Pan­cras Inter­na­tion­al, the new Eurostar ter­mi­nal in Lon­don.

Geof­frey Lee start­ed work on Impact, Stephen­son, Blake’s penul­ti­mate new type­face, in the sum­mer of 1963 when he was a design exec­u­tive with the Pem­ber­ton adver­tis­ing agency in Lon­don. The first appear­ance of the type, which has been likened to Hel­veti­ca Inser­at, was in the Letraset trans­fer for­mat from black ink draw­ings about 4cms deep. For the foundry, char­ac­ters were pro­ject­ed up to 7 inch­es deep from which trac­ings were made on card and for the first few batch­es of the new fount, cut-out pat­terns were sent to Upper Allen Street . Lat­er on the card cut­ting was done at the foundry from Mr Lee’s draw­ings in 6H pen­cil. The card pat­terns were pan­tographed to pro­duce a mas­ter met­al pat­tern which pro­duced mas­ter type. Mr Lee said in a post­ing on the Typophile web­site only months before his death in 2005: ​“Although Impact size range was not large, this still required the grow­ing, jus­ti­fy­ing, and prepar­ing for the cast­ing box of 616 sep­a­rate matri­ces. The final stage was the cast­ing, dress­ing and sort­ing into founts for sale and prepar­ing sales lit­er­a­ture. For a foundry busy with every­day busi­ness the pro­duc­tion time was very good. Inci­den­tal­ly, the price in 1965 of a 60 point 3A 6a fount was £11.16s.11d.

“So I have had the lux­u­ry of met­al type pro­duc­tion by draw­ing, pho­tog­ra­phy, and pan­to­graph, and dig­i­tal type­faces through the com­put­er. It leaves me with intense respect and admi­ra­tion for ear­li­er gen­er­a­tions of type-mak­ers’ skill and ded­i­ca­tion. Hope­ful­ly many of today’s type design­ers are aware that many of their their pre­de­ces­sors had to carve, in steel, a punch for every char­ac­ter in every size of type. Sub­se­quent­ly these punch­es were struck into brass blocks to make the matrix.”

Whether Stephen­son Blake’s his­toric matri­ces like Caslon Old Face, Baskerville, Bell, Fry’s Orna­ment­ed and Mole Foli­ate, will sur­vive is in ques­tion. The Type Muse­um, where they are kept, closed two years ago for lack of funds and its future, if any, is still not known. There are hopes that the Sci­ence Muse­um will save the day. The Sci­ence Muse­um owns the Mono­type col­lec­tion which is ​“on loan” to the Type Muse­um while the Stephen­son, Blake col­lec­tion has a slight­ly dif­fer­ent sta­tus in that the terms of acqui­si­tion by the Type Muse­um say that should the Type Muse­um cease to exist the col­lec­tion would pass to the V&A. Before the Type Muse­um bought the Stephen­son, Blake col­lec­tion there had been hopes in Sheffield that the col­lec­tion would go to the city’s uni­ver­si­ty.

Tim Mar­tin, of the Type Muse­um Soci­ety, which is cam­paign­ing for the muse­um to be saved, told Small Print­er: ​“The muse­um is still poten­tial­ly one of the best edu­ca­tion­al resources for under­stand­ing the his­to­ry and evo­lu­tion of type pro­duc­tion, design and devel­op­ment any­where in the world. That it has now been inac­ces­si­ble to stu­dents for two whole years with no strat­e­gy or state­ment of intent, to return it even to its pre­vi­ous lim­it­ed access, has cre­at­ed a numbed frus­tra­tion amongst its hun­dreds of active sup­port­ers who three years ago were see­ing real progress, in the vol­ume of vis­i­tors, the organ­i­sa­tion and dis­play of the col­lec­tions and the devel­op­ment of a strat­e­gy which held out excit­ing prospects for those inter­est­ed in type com­mu­ni­ca­tion.”

Any­one wish­ing to learn more about Stephen­son, Blake can do so by read­ing Roy Milling­ton’s excel­lent book, Stephen­son Blake, the Last of the Old Eng­lish Type­founders (Oak Knoll Press/the British Library, 2002).

Writ­ten by Rob Firth, this arti­cle first appeared in the British Print­ing Soci­ety’s Small Print­er mag­a­zine