In a factory in Lancashire, a handful of machines are still doing something almost nobody else on earth can do. They are surface-print machines, cast-iron things well over a hundred years old, and there are only a few of their kind left anywhere in the world. Four of them live here, clattering away, mixing hand-blended ink and laying it onto paper in a technique that has scarcely changed in the better part of two centuries. To watch one work is to watch a piece of the Industrial Revolution that never quite stopped.
That, in a sentence, is the point of 1838 Wallcoverings, and the reason for its curious name. In 1838, in nearby Darwen, a Lancashire man named Charles Potter built the first wallpaper printing machine. It sounds like a small thing. It was not. Until that moment, patterned walls were the preserve of the wealthy, laboriously printed by hand from carved wooden blocks and priced accordingly. Potter's machine changed the arithmetic entirely, and within a generation a decorated wall was no longer a badge of privilege but something a Victorian clerk could aspire to.
Laurel Leaf, Ochre Yellow by 1838 Wallcoverings
"1838 was the year a patterned wall stopped being a luxury and became something almost anyone could have."
It is a rare brand that names itself after a genuine turning point in its own industry, and rarer still one that can claim direct descent from it. The firm is run today by a brother and sister, James and Abigail Watson, the fourth generation of a Lancashire family to spend their working lives in wallpaper; their great-grandfather started in the trade in the 1880s, and the line has run unbroken since. The Watsons also print, quietly, for a number of far grander names than their own, which is one of the industry's better-kept secrets. When they launched 1838 under their own flag a few years ago, it was less a new venture than a family finally putting its name above the door.
Kilburns Maze, Blush Pink by 1838 Wallcoverings
Calico Shell, Verde Green by 1838 Wallcoverings
Why you can feel the difference
What makes the surface-print papers special is best understood with your fingertips. The technique lays a generous, wet load of ink onto the paper, wet colour falling onto wet colour, building up a surface with real depth and a faintly raised, hand-painted quality. The inks are still mixed by hand and carried to the rollers on calico blankets, and the result is a richness and a tactility that digital printing, for all its cleverness, simply cannot fake. These are papers that reward being looked at closely and, frankly, being touched, which makes them a particular pleasure in the rooms you move through slowly: a hall, a landing, a small study where the walls are near enough to notice.
Charlotte, Apricot by 1838 Wallcoverings
"Wet ink on wet ink, mixed by hand and carried on calico: a surface you can feel, not just see."
None of which means the firm is stuck in the past. The same team that tends the antique machines is also fluent in the newest digital printing, which is where its dramatic, large-scale murals come from, the sort of design that turns a single wall into an event. The bestselling Wisteria Bloom mural is a good example, a great cascade of blossom that would be impossible on a century-old roller but sings when printed at scale. There is something rather satisfying about a company confident enough to run the oldest technology and the newest side by side, and to let each do what it does best.
Wisteria Bloom, Heather by 1838 Wallcoverings
The archive is the third strand, and here 1838 has done something clever: it has twice raided the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, whose holdings run to some three million designs, and brought a careful handful back to life as wallpaper. A pineapple design lifted from a woven silk of 1707, a rhododendron adapted from a 1920s woodblock, a date-palm mural drawn from a Victorian watercolour; each one painstakingly redrawn and recoloured for a modern room. Pleasingly, when the team first went hunting through the V&A's vast trove, several of the designs they were drawn to turned out to have been made in Lancashire in the first place. The past, it seems, has a way of pointing you home.
Peony Garden, Natural by 1838 Wallcoverings
Palmette, Blue Hue by 1838 Wallcoverings
For all the heritage, these are thoroughly practical papers. They are printed with water-based, non-toxic inks on responsibly sourced backings, and they hang the modern way, pasted to the wall rather than the paper, which makes even the more ambitious designs surprisingly manageable. The character-rich florals and the deeper, more opulent textures are the ones to reach for when a room feels a little too new and wants some soul; the murals, for when it wants a moment of pure drama. As always, a sample seen on your own wall, in your own light, will tell you far more than a screen, and with a surface this tactile it is worth ordering one just to run a hand across it.
Lakeside, Pavilion by 1838 Wallcoverings
Purity, Essence by 1838 Wallcoverings
There is a broader pleasure in all this, beyond the papers themselves. We are living through a quiet rediscovery of things that are actually made, by real hands and real machines, in a place you could point to on a map. 1838 offers that in an unusually literal form: a wallpaper printed on the descendants of the very machine that started it all, a few miles from where a Lancashire inventor changed how the country dressed its walls. Nearly two hundred years on, the story is still being written, one roll at a time.
