New town trail steps back in time

A new self-guided walk around Lancaster following in the footsteps of an inventor and artist who put the city on the printing map, is now available for free.

Lancaster-based arts and heritage charity, Mirador, has produced Karel Klic’s Lancaster Town Trail as part of the Copy That project, supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund, to commemorate the centenary of the pioneer’s death.

The Trail gives locals and visitors the chance to take a gentle walk around Lancaster, discovering places associated with Klic along the way.

Originally from Bohemia, now the Czech Republic, Klic made Lancaster his home in the 1890s and lived in a house which is now part of Lancaster Medical Practice in Meadowside.

Klic invented photogravure printing, a process for reproducing high quality fine art images which meant that most households could afford to have art on their walls at home.  The invention also revolutionised the printing of pictures in the press, in books and on postcards.

He partnered with the Storey Brothers, renowned for producing oil cloth. Together, they established the Rembrandt Intaglio Printing Company whose works are now the site of Lancaster’s Aldi store on the corner of Queen Street and Aldcliffe Road.

Klic was also a classically trained artist himself, fascinated in capturing likenesses, and among his many oil paintings of prominent Lancashire people is a portrait of Sir Thomas Storey which is on display in Lancaster City Museum.

Sir Thomas is shown with plans of the Storey Institute around him and it’s at that very building, now known as The Storey, that the Trail begins and where a major exhibition about Klic will take place this November, a century after his death.

Copies of Karel Klic’s Lancaster Town Trail are available free from various city centre venues including Lancaster City Museum, The Storey, Lancaster Priory and The Gregson.  An online version can be downloaded at https://miradorarts.co.uk/projects/copy-that/