What is letter-cutting?

Letter-cutting is the craft of cutting letters into stone by hand, with a hammer and a chisel. The cutter draws the inscription straight onto the stone and then cuts it, judging the spacing and shaping every letter as the work goes - which is the thing that sets it apart from engraving a ready-made font or blasting a stencil through a rubber mask. I spent a morning in April 2026 at the Cardozo Kindersley Workshop in Cambridge watching it done, and the first surprise is how quiet it is: a tap, a pause, a tap, and a wall of slate slowly fills with words.

A cut letter is not a scratched line. Each stroke is a narrow trench cut in section like a V - two walls meeting at a clean ridge along the bottom, the line the cutters call the spine. That V is the whole point. When light falls across a cut inscription at an angle, one wall of every stroke goes into shadow and the other catches the light, and the letters stand up off the stone without any paint or gilding at all. A flat-bottomed line, the kind a router or a sandblaster leaves, has no spine to throw that shadow, and in raking light it goes dead.

So letter-cutting is easy to confuse with three things it is not. It is not engraving, which follows a design already fixed. It is not sandblasting, where the letters are masked out and the stone cut away by abrasive under pressure. And it is not sign-writing, which is paint on a surface rather than a shape taken out of it. All three reproduce a drawing. The hand letter-cutter is doing something closer to writing: the inscription is composed on the stone, for that stone, at the size it will be read, and then committed - because once a chip is off, it does not go back on.

Like every trade, letter-cutting carries a vocabulary that mostly stays in the workshop.

The V-cut is the standard incised letter, walls meeting at the spine (also called the arris) at the bottom of the trench. Drafting, or setting out, is the drawing of the inscription onto the stone before any chisel touches it - the part where the spacing is decided by eye, letter against letter, rather than by measurement. The serif is the small finishing stroke at the end of a stem; the stem is the main upright; the bowl is the rounded part of a letter like a b or a p.

The tools are few. A dummy is the round mallet, weighted to fall rather than swing. The chisels are pushed and tapped, not hammered hard; for hard stone they are tungsten-tipped so the edge survives. And the discipline behind all of it gets handed to apprentices as a single sentence, which is how the Cardozo Kindersley workshop puts it: stone carving is nothing but sharpening a pencil. The point is that the whole craft lives in controlling one moving edge against the material - the chisel is just a pencil you cannot rub out.

It begins on paper and then on the stone, not in the cutting. The cutter draws the words at full size and works out the spacing - which is the hard part, because even spacing between letters is not even gaps but even weight, and the eye has to learn to see an open letter like an L sitting next to a closed one like an H and judge the air between them. That judgement is the craft. The cutting is the easier half.

Then the drawing goes onto the stone, and the cutter sets the chisel at the centre of a stroke and works outward, taking the V down to its spine in passes rather than one deep cut. Slate takes a fine, crisp edge and is prized for it; English limestones like Portland and Hopton Wood, and the harder sandstones, each cut differently and ask a different touch. The stone is usually set close to upright so the cutter can read the letters as a reader will, in raking light, and see the shadow line forming as the work goes.

None of it can be undone. There is no draft, no rubbing out, no second layer to paint over a mistake. A letter-cutter who mis-judges a stroke has mis-judged it in stone. That is why the years of drawing come first, and why a finished inscription - read in the right light, every spine catching - is the kind of object that looks inevitable, as though the words were always in the stone and someone simply uncovered them.

The English version of this craft runs through one short, traceable line. Edward Johnston revived formal lettering in the early twentieth century and taught Eric Gill; Gill cut letters in stone and, in 1934, took on a young apprentice named David Kindersley. Kindersley founded the workshop in Cambridge that still carries the name. The archive spent a morning there with Lida Kindersley, David’s widow and partner in the work, and their daughter Roxanne, alongside Vincent and the letterer Emily - three generations of the same hand at the same bench.

What stays with me from that morning is not a technique but a recruitment: an apprentice had walked in off the street that same morning to ask to be taken on, which is more or less how the whole line was formed - Gill took David Kindersley, and the workshop has gone on taking people the same way ever since. The archive has also documented Steve Roche, a letter cutter and stonemason working in the same tradition. The full account of the craft - its history, its lineage, and its state - is in the monograph Letter Cut in Stone; the narrative of the visit itself is the journal entry A Morning at Cardozo Kindersley.

Heritage Crafts lists hand letter-cutting as currently viable, which among English heritage crafts counts as good news - it means the craft is being passed on and is not at immediate risk of dying out. But viable is not the same as common. The work is held by a relatively small number of workshops and individual cutters, much of it tied to memorial and commemorative commissions - headstones, building inscriptions, dedication stones - where a hand-cut letter still earns its keep against a sandblasted one.

It is learned the slow way, by apprenticeship, because the part that matters - the spacing judged by eye - cannot be taught from a book or a screen. That makes every working cutter who takes someone on a load-bearing part of the craft’s future. If you want to see it being learned or to learn it yourself, the archive’s Learn a Craft directory points to the workshops and bodies that teach, and the craft monograph lays out the lineage in full.

Is letter-cutting the same as engraving?
No. Engraving and machine-blasting reproduce a design that has already been set; the letter-cutter draws the inscription onto the stone and designs the spacing and the shape of each letter as it is cut. The hand-cut letter has a V-section trench cut to a clean spine, which catches raking light in a way a flat machined cut does not.

What stone is used for letter-cutting?
Welsh slate is prized for the crispness it takes; English limestones such as Portland and Hopton Wood, and sandstones, are all cut. The harder the stone, the more the cutter relies on tungsten-tipped chisels and the slower the work.

How do you learn letter-cutting?
Almost entirely by apprenticeship. There is no shortcut: the spacing and the shaping are judged by eye, and the eye is trained by years at the bench beside someone who already has it. The Heritage Crafts Red List records the craft as currently viable but held by a small number of workshops.