Winterbourne Press

The Winterbourne Press is a working collection of historic printing presses located at Winterbourne House and Garden, an Arts and Crafts house and botanic garden owned by the University of Birmingham. Winterbourne is the ideal location for a working printing press. Printing was central to the Arts and Crafts movement, which inspired the design of Winterbourne. William Morris used a Sherwin & Cope similar to the one on display in the Winterbourne Press. Birmingham itself played a significant role in the development of letterpress printing. The ‘Caslon’ and ‘Baskerville’ typefaces, which are still in use today, are named after the eighteenth-century Midland entrepreneurs who designed them. Winterbourne’s earliest machine, an 1837 Sherwin & Cope Imperial, once belonged to the Flat Earth Press, which was set up during the 1970s by a Birmingham University lecturer and his students. Their machines later fell into disuse but in 2012, Winterbourne salvaged them from a neighboring property, and restored them with the help of volunteers. Winterbourne has built upon this embryonic collection and continues to acquire and restore presses which might otherwise be lost. Other machines in the collection include an Arab platen press dating from the early twentieth century; a Gem Proofing press from the 1930s; and a Heidelberg Platen from the 1960s. Winterbourne’s historic presses are operated regularly by volunteers, who produce merchandise for sale in the shop. Printing demonstrations and letterpress workshops take place on a regular basis.