I spent some time recently in the old Down Recorder building, now home to Pepper John’s Men’s Shed, and found myself standing in front of one of the original Linotype machines.
It stops you in your tracks.
Up close, it is an incredible piece of engineering. Solid cast iron, levers, trays, gears and keys that once worked in rhythm to produce the words people read every week. You can see the wear on it. Decades of hands. Decades of deadlines. It is not polished or staged. It just stands there, honest and heavy, as if it could start up again at any moment.
My dad worked on machines like this for nearly 30 years as a linotype and print operator before going on to set up Plus2Print. This building was a huge part of his working life. The routines, the long days, the craft of setting type and running print properly. It was skilled work. Precise work. Work that mattered.
For me, as a child, it was something different. It was scale and noise and curiosity. I remember racing through the stationery shop, weaving in and out of towering shelves stacked with paper and supplies. The print room always felt alive, even when it was quiet. There was a constant smell of ink and metal. The darkrooms felt mysterious, glowing softly behind closed doors. I probably got under more feet than I should have, but no one ever seemed to mind too much.
When you are small, places like that feel enormous. The machines seem taller, the corridors longer, the people busier and more important than anything else in the world. Going back now, it feels more compact. Familiar. But the weight of its history is still there.
Standing beside that Linotype machine recently, hand resting on cold metal, I could not help but think about the shift in how things are made. From hot metal and physical type to screens and digital files. The pace is faster now. Cleaner. But there is something grounding about seeing where it all came from. It reminds you that craft once required patience, noise, heat and real physical effort.
What makes it even better is that the building is not being left behind. Through Pepper John’s Men’s Shed and the wider community spaces developing around it, it is finding a new purpose. The presses may not be running as they once did, but people are still gathering, building, fixing, talking and learning inside those same walls.
There is something right about that.
A building that once produced newspapers for the community is now becoming a place where the community produces something else. Skills. Connection. Conversation. A sense of belonging.
For me, it is personal. It is a reminder of where I come from, of long days spent tagging along behind my dad, of a trade that shaped our family in quiet ways. But it is also bigger than that. It is about valuing the spaces that built towns like ours and making sure they continue to serve a purpose.
Not everything old needs replaced. Some things just need a new chapter.
Gavin Oakes