Have your Zone 1 & 2 Travel Card at the ready! Your IPW1 Colour Journey is about to depart! Our 40 year heritage as a leading London printing company has it’s foundations in W1, including many of our loyal customers, but we’ve taken in other London postcodes and landmarks along the way. So make yourself a cup of tea and settle in for a very nostalgic IPW1 Colour Journey, with splashes of London history thrown in for good measure!

In IPW1’s early days in the seventies we looked after customers from our Heddon Street studio. Our neighbours included David Bowie, Bay City Rollers, Bosworth’s, K.West and West End Central Post Office. As you can see we were rubbing shoulders with Billy Idol & Generation X, well our van was at least! The black & white photo doesn’t do justice to our van which was ahead of the curve with colour! Sunshine yellow!

Four black & white printers, two colour printers, a fleet of [circus!] vans [x2!] and a sense of humour was all we needed! Fast forward to 2023 and you can now dine at one of the many restaurants such as Heddon Street Kitchen [Gordon Ramsey], Casa do Frango, Ramen Yokocho, The Starman, Piccolino, Sabor, Sarap Filipino Bistro or Ziggy Green, inside or al fresco.

Come the nineties IPW1 had now moved around 150 metres to our New Burlington Street [NBS] home! The street runs east–west from Savile Row to Regent Street, and our new home was the former office of The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition [1914-1917] led by Sir Ernest Shackleton.

The expedition was an attempt to make the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent and he believed the crossing remained the "one great main object of Antarctic journeyings". Shackleton's failed expedition became recognised instead as an epic feat of endurance.

Did some of his great spirit of adventure remain in no. 4? We like to think so, as our armada of printers and a copier now included one colour printer, one digital colour copier, one black & white printer, one large format printer and a somewhat low key white transit van!

Whilst IPW1 were to remain at NBS for a decade we did need to expand and this is where Lots Road came in. We moved our ink on paper machinery to Lots Road in 2008. Before we made this our home, Lots Road housed the Lots Road Power Station. This was a disused coal, oil-fired then gas-fired power station in Chelsea, which supplied electricity to the London Underground system from the 1900s.

At the time it was believed to be the largest power station ever built, and it eventually powered most of the railways and tramways in the Underground Group before it was decommissioned in October 2022. The site was then purchased for redevelopment to convert the station into shops, restaurants and apartments, and to construct additional buildings, including two skyscrapers, on the adjoining land.

With the exception of the iconic Power Station, the area, now known as Chelsea Waterfront, with its landscaped gardens and interlinking bridges, is virtually unrecognisable from our positive attitude-fired four colour printer days!

A now familiar part of the IPW1 journey has been our need to expand, and by 2015 it was all change – we’d moved from Lots Road to The Arch [in Battersea] and from NBS to Great Portland Street [GPS] in W1.

Rather fittingly, the new ink on paper engine relocation to SW8 was under the railway arches where our two colour printers, four poster size+ colour printers, foiling machine, die cutting machine and other finishing machinery remain to this day.

Our no nonsense production site allows us to focus on Proper Printing within a community of other small businesses including our neighbours who keep us refreshed with locally brewed beer and a forklift truck, [ever tried moving a guillotine?!], both on tap!

The IPW1 West End residency continued as we moved a mere 1km to Great Portland Street [GPS] in 2012. Many of our customers by this stage included household restaurant names such as The Ivy Collection, Côte & Pizza Pilgrims and now BBC and The Royal Academy.

Not only had we moved on but so had the advancements in digital printing technology. We took our very first Xerox Iridesse in 2018, the first in Europe, with its speciality colour printing of gold, silver, white, clear and fluorescent pink. We loved it and so did our customers. But we needed more!

So in order to translate our customers’ ever creative designs and requests we soon found ourselves with Xerox Iridesse number 2 [and a black & white printer, one colour digital printer, two large format printers, an ever changing window and of course our appropriately named & branded Partner van!].

Which brings us up to date! In 2022 we needed a third colour digital printer which in turn created the IPW1 Xerox Iridesse Express. And you guessed it, IPW1 was on the move, and this time from W1! As soon as we saw 165 Tower Bridge Road [TBR] we knew we’d found our new home. It was pure gold! The layout over three floors not only doubled our space, but fitted our departments and workflow perfectly. And better still, the space meant we could double our print capacity.

So our first-class colour digital printing journey continues at pace as does our ability to deliver high volume printing at scale! The zonal elements in our print studio means we can seamlessly move from digital printing to finishing to packing to collection, moving at speed to ensure your print reaches you on time, every time.

Like the London Underground and indeed London itself we are ever evolving, expanding in response to our customers’ requirements, and investing in new technologies. Our customers don’t stand still and nor do we, so as the saying goes ‘the only constant is change’!

As a commercial printing company not only do we need to be adaptable and flexible, we also need the capacity to print accurately, consistently and at speed. Our investment in Xerox means we can do just that.

Print and digital colour technology developments continue to have a major impact on us, and our customers alike: it has unleashed creativity like never before, producing incredible quality, spot embellishments and stunning colours and metallic hues. Will we ever tire of these advancements and the beautiful masterpieces our customers design? We don’t think so!

“Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”

Samuel Johnson

What are you waiting for? We’re ready. Are you on-board for Your Colour Journey?

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