The university city is the country's richest concentration of letter-carving, bookbinding, instrument-making, and scholarly craft. The archive documents the workshops whose practice is the hand-made record of English scholarship.
Cambridge is a city of workshops. The colleges, the libraries, and the university press have carried a continuous tradition of hand-made craft for eight hundred years - manuscript illumination, bookbinding, letter-carving, printing, instrument-making, conservation. The archive documents the workshops whose daily practice is the slow, physical record of English scholarship.
The first documented workshop is the Cardozo Kindersley Workshop, which has carried the craft of English letter-carving since David Kindersley set up in Cambridge in the 1940s. The workshop's commissions sit in colleges, churches, and public buildings across the country; the practice is taught to new apprentices every year.
A handful of place-establishing frames - the workshop’s exterior, the front room, the carved-letter walls. The full visit and its photographic record live in the journal entry; the people in the subject pages; the craft itself in the craft essay.
Makers Matriarch of the Cardozo Kindersley Workshop, Cambridge. Widow of David Kindersley. A typographer and stone letter-cutter in her own right who has run the workshop for thirty years and still comes in every day.
Makers Working head of the Cardozo Kindersley Workshop, Cambridge. She has taken over the running of the workshop from her mother-in-law Lida and now teaches apprentices, directs commissions, and keeps the 700-year-old craft of English stone lettering alive for a new generation.
Makers Designer at the Cardozo Kindersley Workshop, Cambridge. Younger son of David and Lida Kindersley, husband of Roxanne. The design hand of the workshop - most pieces begin as a sheet of paper and a pencil at his bench.
Makers Apprentice Lettercutter at the Cardozo Kindersley Workshop, Cambridge. Eight years at the bench. Roxanne Kindersley's longest-running apprentice and the cutter on the Storm and the Calm After the Storm memorial pillar.
English stone letter-cutting from the Trajan tradition through Eric Gill and David Kindersley to the Cardozo Kindersley Workshop in Cambridge. The craft, its history, its living lineage, and the state of the discipline in 2026.
