Five London (and near-London) print studios still running the presses themselves.
There's a particular kind of London art space that isn't quite a gallery and isn't quite a factory — somewhere between the two, where the person who sold you the print is often the same person who pulled it through the press an hour earlier. Here are five, at varying scales, all still running the presses themselves.
01 · Print Club London — Hackney, est. 2007, from £25. Both a working screenprinting studio and an online gallery, home to more than 60 resident artists at any given time. Known for the Blisters poster show — its annual flagship — and for a founding rule that hasn't changed in almost two decades: emerging artists and established names sell side by side, on the same shelf, at the same eye level. Weekly public workshops run from complete-beginner sessions to advanced specialist courses, so the room producing gallery stock on a Tuesday might be teaching a stranger to pull their first squeegee stroke on a Wednesday.
02 · Soho Revue — Greek Street, est. 2015, solo & group shows. Founded by India Rose James inside a former recording studio, the gallery relocated to its current Greek Street home in 2019, where it built a reputation for centring emerging and underrepresented artists — with a particular focus on women — across a programme of solo and group shows. A residency at nearby Artists House puts resident artists directly into the gallery's print room. Soho's old identity as a countercultural, boundary-pushing neighbourhood is treated less as branding and more as a continuity to live up to.
03 · Jealous — Shoreditch, est. 2008; Tate · V&A · IWM. Founded in Crouch End, Jealous has grown into one of the more established names on this list, with credits including Tate, the V&A, the Imperial War Museum and the Saatchi Gallery. Unusually for a publisher of that pedigree, it's still a working print studio you can walk into — three floors of production space, each dedicated to a different stage of the printmaking process, with a street-level gallery showing the results. The Jealous Prize, an annual residency for MA graduates, has sent winners' work into the V&A's permanent collection.
04 · The Private Press — Brighton, est. 2013, an hour by train. Smaller in scale and an hour outside London by train — worth the trip. Founded by Gary Parselle, this studio has quietly printed for Yoko Ono, David Shrigley and Jeremy Deller, with work that's gone on to show at the Design Museum and the Royal Academy. Its Editions series invites a rotating set of contemporary graphic artists to produce limited runs exclusive to the studio: a smaller, more personal operation than Jealous or Print Club, working at the same level of craft.
05 · Projekt 26 — South-East London, archive-in-motion, authenticated originals. The outlier, and the most specific: run by Harriet, a British graphic designer, and Sylwia, a Polish design specialist. Less a general print gallery than a dedicated archive for the Polish School of Posters — the film, circus and travel poster movement that flourished in Communist-era Poland. All vintage stock is authenticated original; modern reprints are produced with direct authorisation from the artists or their estates. Less about discovering new names, more about keeping a genuinely under-known art movement from disappearing.
What connects them: none of these treats the gap between artist and buyer as something to protect. The print you're looking at was very possibly made a few feet from where you're standing, by someone who might walk past you on their way to the next run. That's a different transaction than a white cube gallery offers — closer to visiting someone's workshop than viewing someone's collection.
If you're building a collection, one piece at a time: start at Print Club or Jealous for range and price accessibility. Add Soho Revue if you want a programme built around emerging women artists. Make the trip to Brighton for The Private Press if you care more about who printed it than what's trending. Go to Projekt 26 for something with real, specific history behind it — rather than a name to watch.
