Stone letter-cutting

All records

Every apprenticeship record in this lineage, listed in sequence. Each carries a permanent AP-NNNN archive ID and is citable in its own right.

1. AP-0001 early 1900s

   Edward Johnston → Eric Gill

   London (Central School of Arts and Crafts / private study)

   Edward Johnston, the calligrapher whose 1906 book Writing & Illuminating, and Lettering became the foundational text of the English calligraphic revival, was Eric Gill's primary teacher in the principles of the Roman capital and the handled letterform. The apprenticeship was informal by modern standards but decisive in shape. Everything that Gill subsequently carried into stone descended from what Johnston taught him on paper.

   Source: Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill (1989)

2. AP-0002 1934-1936

   Eric Gill → David Kindersley

   Pigotts, Buckinghamshire

   David Kindersley apprenticed at Eric Gill's workshop at Pigotts from 1934 to 1936. He was among the last apprentices Gill took on personally before the war. The training was total: learn by cutting, by making the mistakes, by taking the correction, by spending thousands of hours at the bench until the proportions of the Roman capital are not rules remembered but movements known. Every subsequent English letter-cutter in the Kindersley line descends from this apprenticeship.

   Source: David Kindersley, Mr Eric Gill: Further Thoughts by an Apprentice (1967)

3. AP-0003 1976 onwards

   David Kindersley → Lida Lopes Cardozo Kindersley

   Cardozo Kindersley Workshop, Cambridge

   Lida Lopes Cardozo came from Amsterdam in 1976 intending to extend her Dutch typographic training into stone. The arrangement at the Cardozo Kindersley Workshop was initially an apprenticeship in David Kindersley's English inscriptional line; it became, over the next two decades, a partnership in both the work and in life. Lida was formed as an English stone letter-cutter inside David's practice and then, when he died in 1995, carried the line forward alone.

4. AP-0004 ongoing, from 2000s

   Lida Kindersley → Roxanne Kindersley

   Cardozo Kindersley Workshop, Cambridge

   Roxanne Kindersley learned the craft inside the Cardozo Kindersley Workshop alongside Lida, over a span of years. The apprenticeship was compressed and absolute. The running of the workshop has been passing from Lida to Roxanne since the 2010s; in 2026 the pass is substantially complete, with Roxanne as the working head and Lida as the matriarch still at the workshop every day.

5. AP-0005 from 22 April 2026

   Roxanne Kindersley → apprentice (name forthcoming)

   Cardozo Kindersley Workshop, Cambridge

   A young woman walked into the Cardozo Kindersley Workshop on the morning of 22 April 2026 without an appointment. She had emailed and telephoned and had not reached anyone; she had got on a train and come to Cambridge and knocked on the door and stated plainly what she was there for. Roxanne set her up at a bench and asked her to sharpen a pencil. She was still sharpening the pencil when the archive photographed her that morning. Full name and record forthcoming on the next contact with the workshop.

   Source: The England Archive, JN-0011