Makers
Steve Roche
Letter Cutter and Stonemason
Stag Works, Sheffield
Letter Cutter and Stonemason
Stag Works, Sheffield
Steve Roche cuts words into stone that will outlast everyone who reads them. He came to the trade late, in the worst month of his life, and has loved every day of it since.
The painted sign over the arch at Stag Works in Sheffield reads Stone, Letter and Sculpture Studio, and the man who runs it is Steve Roche. He is a letter cutter and a stonemason - big-framed, full-bearded, in a flat cap and a t-shirt with a llama and a stag printed on the chest. The first thing you notice is the beard, which is magnificent. The second is the warmth. I have photographed enough makers now to know within ten minutes who I would want as a friend, and Steve was on that list before the cameras came out.
He gave me the run of the place and the time to use it, and listened to my monologue about the archive with the patience of a man who has been interrupted at work before and does not mind. The studio is a working room - benches, racked slabs of stone, a half-cut sign on a trestle, tools within reach of wherever you happen to be standing. It is plainly somewhere real work gets done, and has been for years.
Steve did not grow up cutting stone. He had a job, a normal working life, and then 2008 happened to him in a way that sounds invented until you hear him tell it flat: in the same month he lost the job and broke his leg. Laid up, out of work, with nothing to do but heal and think, he started turning over what he might do next - and, for reasons he is still slightly amused by, he kept landing on stone.
So he took courses. Stonemasonry, then letter cutting. He won a place through a bursary - one of the trusts that fund people into the lettering and masonry trades - and went into it meaning only to find out whether he could. He found out that he could, and that he did not want to stop. That was 2009. He has been at it ever since, which makes the worst month of one year the start of the best run of his working life.
What he does now is largely public work - lettering and stone commissions driven by the council and civic projects, the kind of carved words that end up fixed to a wall or set in a park and read by people who will never know whose hands cut them. That suits him. He is not precious about the work being his; he is precious about it being right.
On the trestle in the yard sat the job of the day: a long slab of grey stone with a line of lettering running its length - songs in tongues, old and new - drawn out in pencil and being cut letter by letter. This is the craft proper, and it is slower and more exact than anything I had expected. There is no undo on a stone. The cut is final the moment it is made.
He showed me how it goes. The letters are drawn first, the spacing worked out by eye on the stone itself - never evenly spaced by ruler, because letters that are measured equal do not look equal. Then the chisel. Each stroke of each letter is a V cut down into the stone at a steady angle, two planes meeting in a clean line at the bottom, so the carved letter catches a shadow and reads from across a street. The serifs - the small finishing strokes at the ends - are where the discipline shows. Get them wrong and the whole word looks amateur. Steve gets them right without appearing to think about it, which is the thing that takes fifteen years to learn.
I watched him work a single letter for a long time without either of us speaking. The mallet taps, the chisel walks the line, a little stone dust lifts and settles. Then he sits back, looks at it, and moves to the next. The word grows the way a row of weaving grows - slowly, and then all at once it is there and looks as though it could never have been otherwise.
The studio is Steve’s. He had a workshop on the other side of Sheffield, then took on this one at Stag Works and made it the centre of his work. When the sculptor Lily Marsh needed real space for a commission, he invited her in to share it - the kind of thing he does - and the two of them have run it together since, in the way that only people who genuinely like each other can share a small room full of dust and sharp tools.
Sometimes it is the same commission - his lettering and her sculpture going out as one piece - and sometimes they are simply two people getting on with separate jobs in companionable earshot. When the dust got thick they carried the work out into the yard, and for a while there were two stones being cut a few feet apart, his words and her form, against the red brick of the old works.
I did not press either of them about home or family - that is not what the day was for - but you do not need to, to see that the arrangement suits them both. Steve loves what he does, plainly and without performance, and the room he built is the proof of it.
Before I packed up, I stood Steve in his own workshop for a proper portrait - the certificates and the shelf of books behind him, the cap on, the beard doing most of the work. He is an easy man to photograph because there is no front to get past; what you point the camera at is what he is.
The lettering, the long civic words cut clean into grey stone for streets and parks across the city, the trade he came to in the worst month of 2008 and has loved every day since - it is its own record now, and worth keeping. Steve Roche made all of it, and the room it comes out of.
