In the middle of a new housing development near Altrincham is an imposing two-storey Victorian factory building topped by a clock tower.

Across the width of the elaborate red brick frontage, the words “Linotype and Machinery Limited” and “AD 1897” are picked out in white bricks. When it was built, this factory represented a high point in Victorian engineering, marking the world’s first successful mechanical typesetter. But times and type have changed, so the Grade II listed building was recently converted to residential apartments, after an extensive renovation that was sensitive to the internal and external appearance.

For well over a century, Linotype was one of the most famous trade names in the printing industry. Even your relatives who knew nothing about print would recognise it as something to do with newspapers and “hot metal”.

Readers more directly involved in print would have followed Linotype as it branched away from mechanical typesetting and embraced successive waves of electronics revolutions, moving into film scanning and phototypesetters in the 1960s and 70s, then microcomputers and digital type in the 1980s, playing a huge supporting role in Apple and Adobe’s desktop publishing systems that changed the industry forever in the 1980s and 90s, before finally being taken over by Heidelberg in 1996. The Linotype name faded from view and the product lines were replaced as newer technologies emerged.

What’s less well known is that another branch of the original hot-metal maker is still trading, and although now of modest size, it’s moved with the digital times. And despite the US-German ownership of its more famous sibling, this one is British owned.

L&M Imaging in Luddendenfoot near Halifax is a direct continuation of the original UK subsidiary of Linotype, first set up in the UK in 1889.

Today it is fairly small-scale, primarily a reseller and servicer of pre-press systems, although it also handles integration to create bespoke products.

Managing director Tim Clough has worked for L&M Imaging since 1995, when he joined as service manager. Back then the company still occupied part of the original Altrincham office block, so he is well aware of the company’s history and significance.

Linotype’s inventor was Ottmar Mergenthaler, a German living and working in the US. As many people know, the Linotype name came from the way it used a keyboard and mechanically set type as whole lines at a time.

This was absolutely revolutionary – before then typesetting was done by hand, character by character, and had barely changed in the 400 years since Gutenberg invented individual typecasting.

In 1886, the Mergenthaler Linotype company was set up in New York by Mergenthaler and his backers to commercialise and sell the system. A UK subsidiary, The Linotype Company, followed in 1889. The first factory was in Hulme Street, off Oxford Road in Manchester, but in 1895 it commissioned a purpose-built factory in Broadheath Industrial Park in nearby Altrincham, next to the Bridgewater Canal. The white lettering originally said “The Linotype Company,” but it was altered after it merged with Machinery Trust to form Linotype & Machinery Ltd in 1903.

Broadheath Industrial Park, begun in 1895, was said to be the world’s first such industrial park. “The site provided 185 staff houses with affordable rents, two football pitches, four tennis courts, two bowling greens, a cricket ground, a playground, and allotments,” says Clough. This concept of linked housing and facilities was a smaller scale version of earlier Victorian era purpose-built factory-centred community complexes that aimed to look after their workers, especially Saltaire near Bradford, Cadbury’s Bournville chocolate site near Birmingham and Lever Brothers’ Port Sunlight soap factory in the Wirral.

“The factory expanded and the range of machines then included newspaper and forms presses,” Clough says. “Business flourished for many years, but by the 1970s, sales were depleting and in the 1980s a management buyout took over the site. With minimal sales, a consolidation of assets took place over the next few years.”

Manufacture of new Linotype hot-metal typesetters ceased in the early 1980s, but the company carried on refurbishing old machines, mainly for overseas markets that had not yet embraced phototypesetting and digital input. It expanded this service for formerly rival machines from Monotype, Intertype and Ludlow.

Eventually, demand dried up and that side of the business came to an end. The big single-storey factory at the back of the brick offices was sold off and for some years was used to store cars. “The full story of the Altrincham site and the management buyout is a very sensitive one, and still referred to by former staff at funerals I have attended,” says Clough. “Quite simply, the management had to dramatically reduce staffing and almost all of the 3,000 staff went within a few years. Add to that the pension fund being insufficient and the new management was far from popular. The final sale of the property to a developer was at a fraction of a previous price offered, but was the best at the time.”

In 1991, L&M Imaging Systems Ltd was formed, with an additional office in London close to many advertising agencies. The company initially supported phototypesetting, servers, workstations, and advanced publishing systems. Until 14 years ago it was still based in part of the Altrincham site, but by 2009 this was being prepared for sale. L&M Imaging Systems initially relocated to Hebden Bridge, then moved five years ago to its current premises in Brearley Mill, a former textile factory in Luddendenfoot, near Halifax, between the Rochdale Canal and the River Calder.

“The current premises are nothing like the Altrincham site and look quite sad in comparison,” says Clough. “With construction trades as neighbours, skips and materials are strewn round communal areas. However, with 8,500 square feet, we have a vast array of spare parts and plenty of space for refurbishing equipment/fabricating modifications.”

Today’s management team is led by Clough as MD, who already had a lot of experience of print and other engineering sectors before he joined as service manager in 1995. Derek Hillyard joined the team as sales director in 2014. He had previously been with ECRM for 25 years as international technical support manager and EMEA sales director, gaining experience in laser imaging. Tim’s son, Matt Clough, became service manager in 2007, after gaining advanced engineering skills in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers.

In its early years L&M Imaging Systems partnered with imagesetter and Rip maker ECRM to sell its ScriptSetter range of film imagesetters. L&M eventually became in effect the UK agent for ECRM, until it pulled out of the CTP market in 2021 and sold its range to Kodak. L&M Imaging still supports ECRM users around the world.

“We also worked for many years in partnership with Sun Chemical, primarily in the screen-printing environment, supporting the Lüscher direct-to-screen systems,” Clough says. The company still sells and supports Lüscher CtP models, some configured for flexo plates, as well as its inkjet JetScreen systems for screen mesh imaging.

Over the years, Clough says, L&M has employed a broad range of optical, imaging, laser, and digital-electronic technologies to meet the business needs of its customers. “Taking laser imaging to the absolute limits has enabled the supply, installation and support of ultra-high-resolution machines capable of exposing ‘endless’ flexible printed circuit boards,” says Clough. “Another direction has been high-speed double-sided LED exposure of metal panels prior to etching. Integration of such machines has required automation and handling. These machines are supplied through L&M Imaging Systems’ many dealerships.”

The dealerships cover consumables, CTP, CTS, inkjet, automation, pneumatic balancers, processing, RIPs and workflow software.

Integration of systems is also an important part of the business, Clough says. “Equipment sourced from multiple suppliers and the need to integrate with existing equipment has sometimes presented challenges but, as always, the answer is yes, we can do it.”

He adds: “Current projects include the supply and installation of a mobile, height-adjustable CMYK print head unit that can be positioned above an existing transport system. Incorporating a Harlequin RIP, this inkjet system can print up to 297mm wide at 457mm/sec onto envelopes, cardboard boxes, napkins, bags and much more.”

THE L&M BUILDING TODAY
In the late 1880s, Linotype was an ambitious company with money to spend, so its UK partners commissioned an office block in flamboyant Victorian style, with ornate exterior brickwork topped by a clock tower, with big stained-glass windows and patterned encaustic floor tiles on the corridors and stairwells inside. There’s a good early history online at bit.ly/3MMNrXO.

It still looks like that today, from the front, anyway, though the Grade II listed building now lords it over an estate of modern houses. Housing developer Morris Homes made it a centrepiece of its Egerton Park development, converting the building into 11 one- and two-bedroom apartments, while keeping many original features in consultation with the local Trafford Council. It cleaned and renovated the outside, fixed the copper roof, repaired some of the metal-framed windows and replaced segments of the stained glass. The rear wall now incorporates the modern apartment walls and windows, though a row of original metal beams shows where the old factory extended from.

The photographs here are courtesy of US documentary maker Doug Wilson, who took them in August 2022. He worked on the acclaimed Linotype: The Film documentary released in 2012, and retained an affection for the company history. His blog about the building, with more pics, is online at bit.ly/3MMWf01.

Morris Homes entered the L&M building into the 2021 House Builders Awards, where it was highly commended. It’s worth taking the video tour on Facebook at bit.ly/3KOC3bA, and a drone tour before the restoration.