Between 1908 and 1974 the borough presses of the north bank produced tens of thousands of notices, handbills and rate demands — a working archive assembled by clerks rather than curators. This talk considers the material qualities of that printed record, the compositors who set it, and what its survival in civic basements tells us about who a city chooses to remember. Attendees are invited to think about the distance between a document that was made to be discarded and one that is now catalogued, conserved and lit.

Speaker — Margit Ellershaw

Born in Trieste, Margit Ellershaw (PhD) is a Leeds-based design historian and a specialist in municipal print culture. After a Bachelors in History of Art and Material Culture at Verrall College (2013), she completed a Masters in Book History at the Halden Institute of Art (2015) and a Fenwick-funded PhD in Design History at Ashcombe University (2021). Ellershaw has led research and public programmes at the Bramfield Gallery, the Ostend Print Biennale, the Ridley Type Foundation and Kestrel Auction House, and worked at Marrowe & Sons as Head of Archives. She is currently Artistic Director of a letterpress residency with the Thorne Foundation for Craft and Industry in Sheffield, and co-editor of the Northern Ephemera Review. Her writing has appeared in several publications, including The Quarterly of Printed Matter and the 12th Ostend Biennale catalogue. She founded the Common Press Collective in March 2021.