In 1946, with the country still clearing the rubble and rebuilding, Ratcliff & Roper Print Group opened its doors. Paper was rationed, type was set by hand, and getting anything printed was a slow, skilled, physical endeavour. Eight decades on, we're marking our 80th anniversary — and it feels like a good moment to reflect on just how much the craft has changed, and what has stubbornly, reassuringly stayed the same.
Where It All Began: Print in the Post-War Years
The print industry that existed in 1946 would be almost unrecognisable today. Compositors arranged individual metal type characters letter by letter into frames. Presses were fed by hand. Colour work was a major undertaking, requiring separate passes through the press for each ink. A run of a few thousand leaflets might take several days from start to finish.
Despite those constraints — or perhaps because of them — print was everywhere. It was how businesses communicated, how governments informed the public, how culture spread. There was no alternative. Print carried weight because it was, quite literally, the only game in town.
The Revolutions That Reshaped the Trade
The decades that followed brought wave after wave of change. A few shifts stand out as genuinely transformative:
- Offset lithography replaced letterpress as the dominant commercial process, making longer runs faster and more consistent.
- Phototypesetting removed metal type from the equation entirely, moving composition onto photographic film.
- Desktop publishing — arriving in the 1980s — handed layout control to designers and clients, fundamentally changing the relationship between print buyers and printers.
- Digital printing made short runs and variable data practical for the first time, opening up possibilities that simply didn't exist before.
- Prepress automation and computer-to-plate technology compressed timescales that once took days into hours.
Each of these shifts demanded that printers invest, retrain, and rethink. Those who adapted thrived. Those who didn't, didn't.
Print Alongside Digital — Not Against It
The arrival of the internet prompted plenty of predictions about print's demise. Those predictions were wrong, though not entirely without basis. Certain print categories — classified advertising, telephone directories, fax cover sheets — did disappear or shrink dramatically. But commercial print, done well, has proven remarkably resilient.
What's changed is how print is used. Today, a well-produced brochure, a carefully designed direct mail piece, or a striking point-of-sale display earns attention precisely because it's physical. In a world saturated with screens, something you can hold has a different kind of presence. Marketers, hospitality businesses, schools, and charities have all found that print and digital work better together than either does alone.
What Hasn't Changed in 80 Years
For all the technology, the fundamentals of good print remain exactly what they were in 1946:
- Colour that's accurate and consistent across a run
- Stock that suits the job — weight, finish, feel
- Registration that's tight and text that's crisp
- Delivery that arrives when it's supposed to
These aren't glamorous things to talk about. But they're what print buyers actually care about, and they're what separates a printer worth working with from one that isn't. Getting them right has always required skill, attention, and proper equipment — in 1946 just as much as in 2026.
Looking Ahead From Barnsley and Sevenoaks
We're proud to be marking 80 years from our sites in Barnsley and Sevenoaks — two places with their own strong industrial and commercial histories. The team here has seen plenty of change and expects to see plenty more. Sustainability, wider format capabilities, smarter finishing, tighter integration with clients' digital workflows — these are the areas shaping the next chapter of commercial print.
If you'd like to talk print — a current project, something you've been wondering about, or just what's possible — you're welcome to get in touch via ratcliffandroperprinters.com.