Stack Magazines and St Bride Foundation uncover 300 years of magazine evolution. Bringing together publishers, designers, historians and academics, this one-day event will show how we ended up with the magazine as it exists in the 21st century, and how today's most exciting publishers are using print in a digital age.

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 from Studio Frith 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, 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.