Reading Magazines - 300 years of magazine evolution
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This was a whole day conference held online and in-person at St Bride Foundation, 18 September 2026.
What is a magazine? How did we end up with the things we know as magazines today? And how are the most exciting magazine publishers using print to reach readers in a digital age? For this year’s London Design Festival, we’re bringing together a group of publishers, historians, and academics to shed light on what it means to make magazines today.
We’re presenting the event in partnership with Stack, the independent magazine club, and it’s all been made possible with the support of Fleet Street Quarter. London has played a huge part in the history of magazine publishing, and we’ll be drawing together some of the threads to show how contemporary editors and designers in the city are continuing 300 years of evolution and reshaping our understanding of magazine publishing.
In partnership with:
About the Speakers
Tony Quinn is a magazine historian, the founder of Magforum.com, and author of the V&A book A History of British Magazine Design. He will kick off the day with a whistlestop tour of the first 250 years of magazine publishing, showing how social, technological, and commercial changes shaped the thing we now know as the magazine.
Dr Sharon Maxwell Magnus is a media historian and principal Lecturer in Mass Communications at the University of Hertfordshire. Last year she published Feminism, UK Women’s Magazines and the Women Who Created Them, and she will speak about the cultural importance and rise of UK women’s magazines from the 1960s to the 1990s.
Scott King was art director for i-D magazine in the late 1990s and creative director for Sleazenation in the early 2000s. In his talk he will speak about the work he did then, and how it has informed more recent projects such as The Debrist Manifesto (2021) and The New Space (2025).
Charlie Baker is editor of The Fence and Mathias Clottu is art director, and in their presentation they will speak about “mining the archives”, borrowing ideas from great magazines past and using them to make a great magazine for this current moment.
Lucy Roeber is editor of Erotic Review and Frith Kerr is art director, and they will be in conversation with Stack founder Steven Watson. Together they will speak about designing the erotic for 2026, and the particular freedoms that a print magazine allows in an increasingly restrictive digital age.
Meara Sharma is senior editor of Elastic magazine, and in her presentation she will show how the magazine subtly subverts conventions of magazine making in order to communicate an original vision of psychedelic art and literature that’s “the ordinary, only slightly, weirdly off”.
Alice Sherwin and Harry Bennett are the founders of Studio Ground Floor, and in their talk they will speak about their work on Pilot magazine. Taking a conceptual approach to each issue’s theme, they create ingenious and avant garde publications, building on and challenging the received wisdom of magazine making.