A new Centre for Print has opened in York, celebrating the city's rich printing press history. There are to be workshops and events, and soon a gallery and shop, and it has a museum element with great iron printing presses in use that date back to the 1850s. Prof Helen Smith is head of University of York's English Department, which helped launch a temporary version after lockdown and has now secured philanthropic and grant funding for a permanent home.
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00:00I'm Helen Smith, I'm a Professor of Literature at the University of York,
00:04but I'm also Director of Thin Ice Press, the York Centre for Print,
00:07and that's where we're standing today.
00:09The centre is tucked into the lovely St Anthony's Gardens in the heart of York,
00:13and it's an open access centre for anyone who's interested in printing or printmaking of any kind.
00:18We set up recently, and we're opening up to members,
00:21to anyone who wants to learn new skills in our workshops,
00:23to people who just want to drop in and see what we're up to.
00:26We'll have a shop and selling gallery, and we'll be running all sorts of courses
00:29and offering lots of different opportunities for people to get involved.
00:32The centre's needed for different reasons.
00:34So one of them is that, as you've seen,
00:36the equipment that you need for printing is often bulky, it's heavy, it's hard to maintain.
00:41We've got a really brilliantly equipped centre,
00:43it's looked after by our technicians, there's lots of support on hand,
00:46so anyone who wants to get their hands on to old-fashioned printing equipment
00:50and have a go at creative work, or who has a project that they want to carry out,
00:53can come here and can get access to the equipment and the materials that they need.
00:57But most importantly, print is on the verge of dying out,
01:00so old-fashioned printing, and especially letterpress printing,
01:03is on the red list of endangered crafts.
01:05And if we don't intervene, and if other people don't step in
01:08to preserve these skills and these materials and this knowledge,
01:11then it won't survive for generations to come.
01:13We've picked up our equipment from a lot of different places.
01:16It is old, and it's got a lovely history,
01:18and that ties in, of course, with York's brilliant and lengthy history of print.
01:21But the equipment that we have, some of it has come from a place called the Type Archive,
01:25which has its own fantastic story of a search to secure and recover this equipment
01:30when it was really on the verge of getting lost in the 1980s and 1990s.
01:35So when type was getting thrown into skips,
01:37when presses were being dismantled and sold for scrap,
01:39there was a woman, Sue Shaw, who collected an awful lot of it and brought it together.
01:43And we're really lucky to be able to give some of that a new home
01:46and a new life here in the York Centre for Print.
01:48We call ourselves Thin Ice Press for two reasons.
01:51So in the winter of 1739, the River Ouse in York froze over.
01:56And as happened in European capitals all over the place, they had a frost fair.
02:00So people poured out onto the frozen river.
02:02There were ballad singers, there were ale sellers, gingerbread sellers,
02:05and there was an enterprising Dublin-born printer called Thomas Gent,
02:09who lived and worked here in York.
02:11He went out onto the ice with rollers and a blanket,
02:14and he set up a souvenir print so you could go along, get your name set in type,
02:17and keep a souvenir of the day.
02:19And in his autobiography, he talks about the idea that the ice started to creak
02:23and to crack around him, and everyone ran away.
02:25And then he wraps up by saying that actually everything was fine, no one got hurt,
02:28they came back and he made loads of money.
02:30So we thought we'd call ourselves Thin Ice Press,
02:32partly to acknowledge that when we set out on this journey,
02:35we were treading into new territory and a little bit uncertain,
02:38and partly as an homage to York's printing history
02:40and the brilliant stories that there are behind printing and its legacies.
02:43The reception has been fantastic so far, and it's lovely to see people in here.
02:47So when we've had workshops, when we've had people in and working,
02:50it's just lovely to have that buzz and that creativity and that energy.
02:53And we've had visitors from all over the globe already,
02:56so already we've had volunteers from a printing museum in Germany dropping in to see us,
02:59someone setting up his own press in upstate New York.
03:02So it's just been fantastic, and we're really keen to see people
03:05and to get that buzz and to keep things running in really exciting, creative ways.