Every printer likes to think there’s something a bit special and unusual about their company. But some depart from the norm in more immediately obvious ways. No corrugated warehouses on industrial estates for these book, magazine, digital, wide-format and craft printers. Instead stables, coal sheds, barns and boats are where they’ve chosen to call ‘home’.
The equestrian centre in Devon
"We were looking originally for some premises in our own village and the farmer we approached didn’t have anything, but knew someone in the next village, so it was just farming community knowledge," says partner Keith Sutherland of how Imprint Academic found premises, seven years ago, for its new short-run book printing venture (this had previously consisted of an HP printer positioned on a bathroom shelf in a cottage).
For Sutherland and his five staff, Imprint Digital’s location on a functioning equestrian centre in the village of Upton Pyne, Devon is both handy and enjoyable. "Just to be able to walk out on your lunch break and sit on a hay bale, is certainly different," says Sutherland.
"If we have a big delivery of paper we can shove it in the barn overnight before we bring it in," adds Sutherland of the practical benefits. "And we share the forklift trucks with the farmer who runs the equestrian centre; when he goes away he gets our dispatch manager to shift his hay bales around."
Kitting out the "empty shell" of a barn that Imprint first moved into cost around £50,000. But making up for this are the very low business rates charged on the premises. And the large space is "nicely flexible" for housing Imprint’s Canon Océ 6250s, Konica Minolta 6501, two Xerox colour machines, and array of binding, laminating and guillotining kit.
Sutherland wouldn’t swap his location for the world. "It’s so nice to be in a non-industrial environment where you just walk out of the door and there are horses," he says.
The 19th century barn
When wealthy Cambridgeshire landowner and benefactor Theodore Vincent Webb commissioned a farm to be built in St Neots in 1844, little could he have comprehended the incredible technological feats that would one day take place there.
Not that these would happen for a good while. The barn buildings on Potters Road stayed true to their original purpose and were used to house cattle and store hay for some 160 years. Then in 2005 they were renovated into office premises and wide-format printer Macro Art decided this would be the perfect place to relocate its range of UV, solvent and dye-sublimation kit.
"Prior to that we were in Great Granston and we had some buildings that were very Nissen hut-style, not brilliant at all," reports office manager Ben Seward. "So due to the nature of what we were doing we obviously had to find somewhere large enough to accommodate us."
The company, which produces banners, trucksides and building wraps for clients as prestigious as Harrods and the O2, couldn’t have been more pleased with the move. "The bespoke production barn means we can lay out larger prints all in one room, so the flow of jobs through the building is better – rather than going up and down stairs to finish them, they can all be done in one room," says Seward.
"It’s probably our best sales tool too. People come and think ‘wow, that’s quite fantastic,’ and once they get inside and see what we do, it captures them even more," he adds, reporting that the real show-stopper is the courtyard’s fountain, added in 2005, depicting the four goddesses of the harvest. Theodore Vincent Webb would have been proud.
The canal boat
Most printers expend great amounts of energy ensuring their pressrooms are kept completely immaculate and dust-free. Not Will Graham. He has a coal fire pretty much right next to his Roland Cadet press, but it’s a necessary evil when your company is operating out of a 18x1.8m boat… and it’s winter.
Facing the challenge of keeping any dust firmly under control is one of the downsides of living and printing on a boat – that and having to keep the boat’s engine running to power the press, and not being able to escape very far from work. But these cons are nothing compared to the pros of being able to change location and scenery on a whim, and a one second commute, reports Graham.
"It’s the same problem that everyone else working from home has, getting away from it. But we can get out of the boat and go for a walk down the tow path," says Graham. "And we love being able to travel around – last year we concentrated on travelling around the South; this year we aim to get up to Yorkshire."
Graham and partner Michelle set The Graphics Boat up six years ago, when Graham was made redundant from a tiling company and Michelle from her job as an accountant. To enable them to move around, most of the boat, caravan and horsebox signage work they do is sourced online. "Then as long as we can get to a post office to post the orders out it doesn’t matter where we are," explains Graham.
"No one else has a machine on a boat like we have," he continues. "Because of space limitations we laminate by hand. The maximum print we can do is about 2m long; any bigger and we have to outsource it."
The purpose-built eco premises
For Simon Joy, account development manager at Kent-based Reflex Printed Plastics, the proof that his company is doing a good job of keeping tabs on its environmental impact and nearing its goal of achieving ISO 140001 this September, is clear to see.
"When the deer walk up and eat the grass right next to you, you do feel you haven’t impacted on your environment too much," he says, explaining that the 22 acres of greenbelt land his place of work has planning permission to be on, and the woodland found here, is also home to all manner of other wildlife.
Quite a striking contrast to the look of this rural idyll is Reflex’s purpose-built, rather futuristic looking premises. The company first started out in 1976 and decided, in 2001, to relocate from an industrial estate in Tunbridge Wells when needing more space to accommodate a shift from screen to predominantly litho technology, and more finishing equipment.
"The site used to be used by a motorway maintenance company, housed in concrete cow sheds. We removed them and took all the rubble away and cleared where they used to grow the seeds for motorway embankments. Everything had to be treated to make sure nothing was left," reports Joy.
Then it was a case of ensuring the new building was as efficient and so as environmentally friendly as possible to heat and cool. "It’s very economical to run as it’s only single height, whereas a lot of industrial units you buy now are too high," says Joy. "We went much further than the legal minimum for insulation because we knew that in 10 years, they’d probably double the requirement. We don’t have air conditioning, we have air handling, which keeps temperatures down in the summer and makes it easier to heat in winter."
"It’s good to have everything laid out how you want it," adds Joy. "And it’s also nice having the countryside all around."
The inner-city rabbit warren
You might think watching his brand new digital press being completely dismantled to be transported to the top floor of his building, would have caused 1st Byte director Lawrence Dalton to rethink his inner-city London location. But in fact being squeezed into a 930sqm, maze-like space in bustling Clerkenwell, is critical to the digital print firm’s success.
"It’s very squashed, particularly if we have to move machines," says Dalton. "We’ve now had windows on every floor converted into doors. We used to use cranes but now we’ve got it down to a fine art – we have someone with a forklift. And it does cause problems with finding where jobs are and running around."
"But our clients literally insist we be here because they will count the minutes when we’re delivering a job and even if we were in King’s Cross it would preclude us," he explains.
And in fact the Clerkenwell premises are positively roomy compared with the 93sqm premises in Soho the company first started out in, and the basement of a church they operated out of before the move to Clerkenwell in 1998.
So for Dalton, it’s about ensuring the business’s range of Indigo and Xeikon digital presses, and extensive finishing facilities are laid out as intelligently as possible over the building’s nine floors. And it’s about getting the most out of his Tharstern MIS to track jobs round the building.
In fact there are certain unexpected benefits to chasing up and down stairs all day, says Dalton. "No one here has to worry about going to step classes, that’s for sure!" he quips.
The coal shed
Some might struggle to see the silver lining of being based in a coal shed. But not Adam Piper, founder of Rochester-based open access print studio The Coal Shed. He’s taken the phrase rather literally by installing silver roof insulation, a step that is both practical and environmentally friendly, but also makes the shed more pleasant to be in, says Piper.
Insulating the shed wasn’t the only challenge confronting Piper when he founded the studio in April last year. Before any printing could be done on its etching and screen printing presses or any wood-cut or lino work on The Coal Shed’s Albion press, pipes to supply clean water and a supply of electricity had to be sorted.
But now the shed’s a really enjoyable place to be for the studio’s 15 members and for workshop attendees, says Piper. "It’s just a really nice unusual space. We’re right on the river Medway which is a great view, so it’s really quite a special little corner," he says.
"And being in a coal shed means a much cheaper lease," he adds. "The per-foot price is around half what I paid on my previous space in Chatham. A real advantage of taking over a cheaper lease is that the landlord is less averse to me making changes. So come winter I’m hoping to have a wood burner in here."
Thus Piper’s slogan for the studio: ‘Every shed has a silver lining’.
The Grade II-listed stables
Not many printers can say their premises are Grade II listed, or that they were once part of a duke’s estate. Admittedly the buildings which house Derbyshire’s Buxton Press did used to be the stables of the Duke of Devonshire’s estate rather than anything even grander. But this certainly doesn’t detract from their splendor.
The dressed stone façade of the building in fact dates back to 1836, becoming a printing premises for the newly formed Derbyshire Printing Company around the turn of the century. It became home to magazine, brochure and catalogue printers Buxton in the 1930s, with the company restructuring and rebuilding those spaces behind the historic façade to make them fit to house one of the largest installations of long perfecting magazine printing presses in the UK, among other extensive facilities.
"Because the front’s Grade II listed, we can’t touch it, but we wouldn’t want to anyway," says sales and marketing manager Lindsay Frost. She says that entering every day through the high carriage archway through which the Duke’s stately horses and carriages were once driven, is rather special.
"When you come to work it does feel very nice walking through that doorway," she says. "It’s a good start to your day. It’s very nice for clients to come to as well because it’s an immediate talking point."
