background
War on Want was an umbrella charity, and in the mid 1970s its printshop expanded from producing various in-house work to becoming a place where various political printing could be done by amicable staff for good rates. The workers and equipment would become the basis of Lithosphere printing co-op. See below.
narratives
I was involved in the management of War on Want for a few years, particularly in its support for the Grunwick Strikers, and in 1979 “went downstairs” to work in their Printshop, where all sorts of campaigning and a bit of arts stuff was printed as well as WoW's own propaganda.
Ironically, it was the Grunwick involvement which forced WoW to hive-off the Printshop as a result of the subsequent Charities Commission investigation, and that's how I found myself a founder member of the Lithosphere Co-op on April Fools Day 1980.
Anyway, little was I to know what I was letting myself in for when I went downstairs to that basement between the ticket office and the tunnels at Caledonian Road Tube Station and started as the camera operator and platemaker, after a couple of sessions training by my RVA (Returned Volunteer Action) colleague Bob Curtis. But that\'s another story. Tom Reid