“We gave them a foreshore that had been re-drawn from aerial photographs and was wrong in four places. They walked it and found a fifth.”
Harbour Master, Rye Harbour
Cartographic press · Rye, est. 1868
Every line on it was walked first.
We survey the ground on foot, cut the plate by hand, and pull the edition on a press that has stood in the same room since 1868. Charts and maps that are right because somebody went and looked.
1868
Press in service
312
Plates in the archive
1,140
Miles walked, 2025
40
Sheets to an edition
The workshop
The press has not moved since it was installed.
No. 4 is a Hunter Penrose direct-drive with a thirty-inch bed, delivered to Watchbell Street in the autumn of 1868 and never taken out of the room since — the doorway was rebuilt around it in 1931. It has printed tithe maps, two wars' worth of foreshore surveys, and the harbour plans the Rye pilots still work from.
Nothing here is automated, and that is not nostalgia. A plate cut by hand holds a line at four thousandths of an inch, takes a correction forty years later, and prints for a century. No file we could give you does any of those three.
Plate i — No. 4 on the day of its last re-bearing, 2019
Key to the work
Six things we do, and nothing else.
Read this the way you would read the key in a chart's margin: the symbol, the name of the thing, and what it means in practice.
Commissioned surveys01
We walk it. Chain, level and a notebook, then a fair copy drawn back at the bench. Estates, foreshore, parkland, parish boundaries.
Copperplate engraving02
Cut in reverse with a burin into rolled copper. Lettering by hand, water in italic, land in roman — as it has always been done.
Editions & printing03
Forty sheets to an edition, damped and pulled one at a time on No. 4. Somerset or Zerkall rag, numbered and signed at the plate mark.
Plate restoration04
Struck, corroded or worn plates re-cut and re-proofed. We have brought back plates last printed in 1904 without inventing a line.
Chart correction05
Coastlines move. We re-survey the changed stretch and cut the correction into the existing plate, so the edition stays current.
Mounting & framing06
Linen-backed and rolled on an ash batten, or framed in oak with museum glass. Both done here; neither sent out.
Scale of the thing
Current edition
The Rother, from Scots Float to the sea
Walked over eleven days in March, at low water on every tide we could reach. Four miles of river, the whole of the eastern foreshore, and every sounding taken twice. Cut over the following winter onto a single plate, 22 by 15 inches, and printed in an edition of forty.
Nine remain. £340 the sheet, unframed.
Said of the work
People who checked it against the ground
“The 1889 estate plate had a crack across the park and two owners' worth of bad amateur re-cutting. It prints now as if none of that ever happened.”
Collections Manager, Bodiam Estate
“Eighteen months from first walk to framed sheet, and they told us it would be eighteen months. Nobody else would even quote.”
Commodore, Camber Sands Sailing Club
From the archive
Three sheets, indexed as they sit in the drawer
A1
The Rother at low water
Plate xxxi · 1:10,560 · edition of 40
A2
Rye Hill, contoured at 25ft
Plate xii · hachured relief · edition of 25
A3
Rose of thirty-two points
Taken from the 1878 plate · re-cut 2021
Commissions
Tell us what ground you want drawn.
We take on eight or nine commissions a year and we are usually a season behind. Write, or come to Watchbell Street on a Tuesday and we will put the kettle on and get the drawers out.