Stack and St Bride Foundation uncover 300 years of magazine evolution
Stack and St Bride Foundation uncover 300 years of magazine evolution
Location
Date
Description
What is a magazine? How did we end up with the things we know as magazines today? And how are the most exciting magazine publishers using print to reach readers in a digital age? For this year’s London Design Festival, we’re bringing together a group of publishers, historians, and academics to shed light on what it means to make magazines today.
We’re presenting the event in partnership with Stack, the independent magazine club, and it’s all been made possible with the support of Fleet Street Quarter. London has played a huge part in the history of magazine publishing, and we’ll be drawing together some of the threads to show how contemporary editors and designers in the city are continuing 300 years of evolution and reshaping our understanding of magazine publishing.
It’s all happening on Friday 18 September 2026, with a day of talks, Q&As, networking, and of course drinks in the evening.
In partnership with:
In-Person Timings
Doors open for registration: 9:30am
Event starts: 10am
Event ends: 6pm
Online Timings: 10am - 4pm
About the Speakers
Tony Quinn is a magazine historian, the founder of Magforum.com, and author of the V&A book A History of British Magazine Design. He will kick off the day with a whistlestop tour of the first 250 years of magazine publishing, showing how social, technological, and commercial changes shaped the thing we now know as the magazine.
Dr Sharon Maxwell Magnus is a media historian and principal Lecturer in Mass Communications at the University of Hertfordshire. Last year she published Feminism, UK Women’s Magazines and the Women Who Created Them, and she will speak about the cultural importance and rise of UK women’s magazines from the 1960s to the 1990s.
Scott King was art director for i-D magazine in the late 1990s and creative director for Sleazenation in the early 2000s. In his talk he will speak about the work he did then, and how it has informed more recent projects such as The Debrist Manifesto (2021) and The New Space (2025).
Charlie Baker is editor of The Fence and Mathias Clottu is art director, and in their presentation they will speak about “mining the archives”, borrowing ideas from great magazines past and using them to make a great magazine for this current moment.
Lucy Roeber is editor of Erotic Review and Frith Kerr is art director, and they will be in conversation with Stack founder Steven Watson. Together they will speak about designing the erotic for 2026, and the particular freedoms that a print magazine allows in an increasingly restrictive digital age.
Meara Sharma is senior editor of Elastic magazine, and in her presentation she will show how the magazine subtly subverts conventions of magazine making in order to communicate an original vision of psychedelic art and literature that’s “the ordinary, only slightly, weirdly off”.
Alice Sherwin and Harry Bennett are the founders of Studio Ground Floor, and in their talk they will speak about their work on Pilot magazine. Taking a conceptual approach to each issue’s theme, they create ingenious and avant garde publications, building on and challenging the received wisdom of magazine making.
If you have any questions, please contact events@sbf.org.uk
Organiser
Established in 1891 with a clear social and cultural purpose, St Bride Foundation is one of London’s hidden gems.
Housed in a beautiful Grade II listed Victorian building, St Bride Foundation was originally set up to serve the burgeoning print and publishing trade of nearby Fleet Street, and is now finding a new contemporary audience of designers, printmakers and typographers who come to enjoy a regular programme of design events and workshops.
Many thousands of books, printing-related periodicals and physical objects are at the heart of St Bride Library. Volumes on the history of printing, typography, newspaper design and paper-making jostle for space alongside one of the world’s largest and most significant collections of type specimens. The printed, written, carved and cast word may be found at St Bride in its myriad forms. Architectural lettering and examples of applied typography in many media, together with substantial collections of steel punches and casting matrices for metal types are also held in this eclectic collection. The Reading Room is open to visitors twice a month and on other days by appointment. Although we operate on a cost-neutral basis, it is necessary to charge for some of our services. Details are available by emailing the library team at library@sbf.org.uk.
St Bride retains many of its original features, including the baths, laundry, printing rooms and library. As part of the Foundation’s original mission to provide for the community, many of the building’s unique and characterful spaces are available to hire whether for meetings, weddings or classes.
St Bride also houses the popular Bridewell Theatre, and Bridewell Bar (once the laundry), and hosts a year-round programme of plays, comedy, music and exhibitions.
With some 65,000 visitors a year St Bride Foundation is a major London hub for the creative arts in London. We look forward to welcoming you soon.
Venue
St Bride Foundation, 14 Bride Ln, EC4Y 8EQ London
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