It was heartbreak that first led Gwyneth Alban Davis to the Lake District. The young woman had been abandoned by her wartime lover, and in 1946 sought pastoral respite in the town of Ambleside on the edge of Lake Windemere. What began as a two-week sojourn became an unlikely four-and-a-half-year stay, where she embedded herself within a small community of artist exiles including the Dadaist Kurt Schwitters and the painter Hilde Goldschmidt, who congregated around the former’s Merz Barn, a dilapidated cottage turned ‘total work of art’.
Alban Davis was not particularly well off. She took to washing dishes at a local hotel to make ends meet, and sought the owner’s permission to renovate an old, beaten-up caravan she found on its grounds. With the help of local craftsmen and friends she made a habitable if diminutive home in the woods, and set about finding a more sustainable revenue stream that could capitalise on her training as a printmaker at Manchester School of Art.
With the aid of a supportive uncle – who appreciated both her creative spirit and tenacity – she bought a small, treadle-operated printing press, which could produce impressions pulled from her carefully carved woodblocks. With this new (though practically antique) equipment, she christened her business the Caravan Press, and set about producing depictions of local scenes and illustrated stationary, which could be sold to tourists, businesses and the wider community. She also invited her fellow artists to create commercially viable work that could be conceived with the press, thus introducing a much-needed form of income for her wider circle.
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Although Alban Davis’s depictions are far from radical, her enterprise was a rarity. Starting a business as an independent woman was no easy task in 1940s England, and her reciprocal creative relationships with Goldschmidt and Schwitters (particularly her devotion to preserving the latter’s legacy) has been all but forgotten.
There is even evidence that artistic collaboration was at play. Dr Heather Mullender-Ross, who has worked with artist Lukas Hornby on re-cataloguing and reprinting Alban Davis’s archive, explains that Schwitters created a tiny artwork for the caravan itself. Furthermore, ‘She [Alban Davis] was very invested in bringing Schwitters’s work to bigger audiences. She believed in his work, and he believed in hers. In her manuscript, it talks about him taking some of her misprints and using them in his work. I’m sure I’ve seen evidence of that in the Sprengel Museum [in Hanover].’
It was Mullender-Ross who heard that the artist’s press was at risk of disappearing. It had long resided in the Merz Barn after Alban Davis’s death, and her son, Bill, was concerned that it might be scrapped if the controversial sale of the property went ahead. ‘Given my research, he came to me and asked if there was a place where it could be kept safe,’ says Mullender-Ross. The solution came through Tracy Hill, an artist and researcher who co-founded the Artlab Contemporary Print Studios at the University of Central Lancashire with Magda Stawarska, and who had provided expert advice when researching this overlooked artist.
Once the decision was made to move the press and archive to the university, a one-day symposium arranged with renowned artist Lubaina Himid sparked not only further research into Alban Davis’s legacy, but an entirely new residency programme that builds on her remarkable work, titled Women in Print. According to Hill: ‘These few acts have launched an entirely new project, which began by inviting women who were doing extraordinary things with print and challenging its definition. Now, it is all about inviting women who don’t consider printmaking part of their practice, and helping them expand and challenge it. They are given permission to try new things.’
This collaborative initiative is at the heart of what Alban Davis conceived with the Caravan Press, and the project’s reach continues to grow. Women in Print has developed an exhibition at the National Trust property Allan Bank in the Lake District (a Georgian villa formerly home to William Wordsworth). It is also launching a range of editions produced by programme residents at this year’s Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair, including a piece by Himid and Sana Obaid, who is known primarily as a miniaturist painter and multimedia artist. She was the winner of the inaugural WCPF x Women in Print award in 2024, which included a coveted residency spot. ‘We never get time to connect to ourselves fully,’ Obaid would later say. ‘This residency has allowed me that much needed, valuable time… this has been a gift.’
Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair runs at at Woolwich Works, London, from 13–16 November 2025. For more information, visit woolwichprintfair.com
‘Women in Print – The Caravan Press’ runs at Allan Bank, Grasmere, until December 2026. For more information, visit nationaltrust.org
