Richard Kindersley, who has died aged 86, was a letter cutter, letter designer and sculptor, as well as a teacher and mentor with a passion for materials and architecture. Although the very opposite of a luddite, he remained true to the belief that handwork has a special value, offering a unique coordination between hand and eye, and the gift of the maker’s creativity to the viewer.
This passionate belief, however, was never to conflict with his desire to integrate his lettering with modern architecture, beginning with his work for William Holford in the late 1960s at Exeter University. Left to themselves, many architects fell back on variations of typefaces such as Univers or Helvetica, which may have worked for internal signage but not externally. Kindersley put down a marker early with his rugged cast concrete letters announcing the “CATHEDRAL CHURCH OF SS PETER & PAUL”, the Roman Catholic masterpiece by the Percy Thomas Partnership in Clifton, Bristol, completed in 1973, the entire building “a sermon in concrete”.
He designed lettering for Holford’s 1973 new London Bridge, while to commemorate the 1991 Queen Elizabeth II Bridge – the Dartford Crossing over the Thames – Kindersley experimented with the hotwire carving of expanded polystyrene, making letters in reverse to be cast in concrete, the lettering in high relief carried on a monolith echoing the pylons carrying the bridge. In 2000 he cast a dramatic concrete coat of arms for Liverpool crown court, massive and entirely integrated with the concrete cladding. In pursuit of integration with the built environment he also carved directly into concrete and brick, made forged and laser-cut steel letters, and created freestanding letters in plaster.
Inscriptions are arguably a form of sculpture, but Kindersley also created a heterogenous series of actual sculptures – an abstract lead relief sculpture in 1975 for Exeter University, a series of carved brick reliefs for civic sites, and a remarkable 1980 cast-aluminium totem The Seven Ages of Man for Post Office Telecommunications at Baynard House in the City of London, with lines from Jacques’s speech in As You Like It in raised letters at the base.
Outside St Paul’s Cathedral, Kindersley designed a floor plan of the pre-fire of London building with an outline of the present building superimposed. The seven metre-long 2009 installation is made of Welsh slate and stone from the Isle of Purbeck, Dorset, with the outlines created through the use of waterjet technology.
In recent years, Kindersley took increasing interest in the megalith form, one of his most moving creations being the 2002 Emigration Stone overlooking the sea at Cromarty commemorating the forced 1830s departures of Highlanders for North America. For the millennium, Kindersley cut a series of well-chosen inscriptions into massive standing stones, now installed in a grassy site at Gatton Park, Surrey. His memorial plaques and headstones, including the 2009 Dunblane Massacre Standing Stone in Dunblane Cathedral, often had the quality of megaliths.
Kindersley taught at the Central School of Art and Design for a year in the 70s and was a visiting lecturer and trustee at City & Guilds of London Art School. Until 2014 he would take yearly spring trips with students and lettering enthusiasts to Rome, Pompeii and Naples, to study significant inscriptions of the Republican, Imperial and Renaissance periods.
His deep understanding of the culture of Roman inscriptions informed his most challenging recent commission. Completed in 2021 despite Covid lockdowns, and when he had almost retired, Kindersley led the creation and management of all the lettering for the British Normandy Memorial in France overlooking Gold Beach at Ver-sur-Mer.
The architect Liam O’Connor’s neoclassical central lodge and the extensive name-bearing colonnades were constructed in solid limestone, selected by Kindersley, with hand-cut inscriptions on the central building. The names of the majority of the 22,442 people who died in the course of the D-day landings and the Battle of Normandy are, however, digitally machine-cut, with each letter cut deep for longevity using a font designed by Kindersley. It was a difficult compromise but a necessary one, Kindersley realising that to cut each name, rank and age by hand would have taken five skilled makers well over 10 years to complete.
Born in London, Richard was the eldest child of Christine (nee Sharpe) and David Kindersley, the distinguished letter cutter and letter designer who had been trained by Eric Gill, thus putting Richard in the direct lineage of the early 20th-century refreshment of letter cutting and typography in Britain.
Richard, his brother, Peter (later the founder of the publishing house Dorling Kindersley), and sister, Katie, grew up in stone-carving workshops, and were taught handwriting by the eminent calligrapher Wendy Westover; Richard entered formal education only at the age of 12.
He left Norwich school (formerly King Edward Vl grammar school) early to go to Cambridge School of Art with ambitions to make films. While waiting to join the Shell Film Unit, Kindersley began to work with his father at Dale’s Barn, Cambridgeshire. He took a two-year apprenticeship when he was 21, and discovered under his father’s tutelage a love for lettering and its long inscriptional history. In 1970 he founded his own studio in Kennington, south London, where he remained, latterly planning to retire but never quite able to close down his workshop.
Each morning he rose early to meditate with his wife, Katherine (nee Harper), whom he married in 1989, then walked across the courtyard to his studio and stone store on the ground floor with a spiral stair leading to his large library. On one wall of his workshop hung laser-cut steel letters spelling out the famous eco-quotation “Treat the Earth well …”, as well as a D cut in Portland stone, based on a single carved letter seen on a fragment on the Via Appia, and a monumental G cast in resin.
A kind, intensely spiritual man, he was revered by former students, his teaching playing an important part in keeping alive the craft of adventurous lettering. From 2001 until 2014 he ran a yearly teaching workshop at Cromarty Arts in the Highlands. Latterly he and Katherine would spend three or four months in the Mani peninsula in Greece, taking pleasure in a land of stone.
Among his many honours, in 2001 he was made an honorary fellow of Riba, was three times awarded Henry Hering memorial medals (by the US National Sculpture Society) for distinction in collaboration between architect and sculptor, and was given the freedom of the City of London. He was a member of the Art Workers’ Guild, Letter Exchange and the Wynkyn de Worde Society, and was a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Examples of his work are held by the Victoria and Albert Museum and can be seen in many secular settings and in churches and cathedrals throughout Britain, and his life was recorded in 2011-12 for National Life Stories at the British Library.
He is survived by Katherine and their two sons, Daniel and Matthew, by a son, Peter, from his first marriage, to Rosemary Jacques, which ended in divorce, and by five grandchildren.
• Richard James Kindersley, stone letter cutter and sculptor, born 14 May 1939; died 27 November 2025
