The Golden Age of British Playing Cards - De La Rue, Goodall & the Heritage We Carry Forward

Every deck of playing cards you've ever held carries within it the ghost of a golden age. The court cards - the King, Queen and Jack staring back at you in their mirror-image symmetry - are not the product of modern design software or contemporary aesthetics. They are, in almost every meaningful sense, British – or at least, some of them are. And they were perfected right here in our little corner of the British Isles, over the course of a remarkable century, by a handful of craftsmen and manufacturers whose work we at A. Haines Playing Cards consider a direct inspiration for everything we do today.

This is the story of that golden age - and why, from a small studio in Manchester, it matters more to us than anything.

The Worshipful Company & The Birth of British Card Making

The history of playing cards in Britain stretches back centuries. Records from London's port books show playing cards being imported as far back as 1477 - a chest of 864 packs, valued at less than a farthing each. For most of those early centuries, cards were a largely imported commodity, made on the continent and shipped to England in vast quantities.

That began to change in 1628, when King Charles I formally approved the creation of the Worshipful Company of Makers of Playing Cards - a guild of London card makers granted the power to restrict foreign imports, collect duties, and enforce quality standards. It was an act of protectionism that would, over the following two centuries, nurture a distinctly British tradition of playing card design and manufacture. The London card makers who emerged from this protected market didn't simply copy European designs, they gradually shaped something new: a standard that would, in time, be adopted and imitated by manufacturers all over the world.

That standard - the English pattern, with its particular arrangement of court figures, its Ace of Spades bearing the duty stamp, and double-headed symmetry, is what you hold in your hand today when you pick up an ordinary deck of cards. It was built in London. And it was perfected by two firms above all others.

De La Rue: Inventor Of The Modern British Playing Card

Thomas De La Rue arrived in London in 1818 from Guernsey, setting up initially as a straw hat manufacturer before his restless commercial instincts led him to printing. By around 1828 he had turned his full attention to playing cards, and in 1831 he was granted a patent for introducing letterpress printing to their manufacture - a technological leap that transformed what had been a largely craft-based cottage industry into something altogether more modern and precise.

He produced his first playing cards in 1832. Over the decades that followed, Thomas De La Rue & Co. became the dominant force in British - and arguably international - playing card design. Their work was meticulous: custom court card designs, elaborately decorated back patterns, Aces of Spades that doubled as statements of prestige. They opened offices in New York and Paris, produced decks for export markets across the Commonwealth, and attracted designers of genuine distinction, among them Owen Jones, one of the most celebrated decorative artists of the Victorian era, whose playing card back designs became prized collector's items.

De La Rue came to be recognised as the inventor of the modern English playing card - and the studio he built in London cast a shadow that reaches all the way to us here in Manchester.

De La Rue's printing works at Bunhill Row in London became a landmark of Victorian commercial craftsmanship: until the autumn of 1940, when the Blitz destroyed them entirely. It is one of the quieter tragedies of the Second World War that so much of Britain's playing card heritage was destroyed in that raid.

Goodall: The Camden Town Giant

If De La Rue was the patrician of the British playing card world, Charles Goodall & Son was its industrious working heart. Founded in Soho in 1820, the same year Thomas De La Rue was finding his feet in London, the Goodall business relocated to Great College Street in Camden Town and grew into one of the most significant manufacturing operations in the city.

At its peak, the Camden Works employed over a thousand people and produced in excess of two million packs of playing cards a year. By the time Goodall and De La Rue were operating in full rivalry, the two firms between them accounted for more than two-thirds of all playing cards made in England. By the turn of the twentieth century, Goodall's Camden Works alone was responsible for roughly three-quarters of British playing card output - a staggering concentration of craft in one north London address.

But Goodall's legacy is not principally one of volume. It is one of design. Under the artistic stewardship of George Clulow, who joined as a young printer in the late 1850s and eventually became a partner and Master of the Worshipful Company, Goodall's court card designs became the standard upon which most later manufacturers, British and international alike, built their own. The double-headed court card format that Goodall pioneered - making face cards readable from either end - is the design we still use today, universally, across the entire world. For those interested in becoming members of the A. Haines Playing Cards Patreon Subscription, during our Year 2 cycle we meticulously restored an antique Goodall deck from original source material – any surplus stock at the time of writing will be found in the Members’ Lounge area of our store.

The firm also produced some of the most beautiful collector decks of the Victorian era: the "Historic" series depicting royal costumes from four periods of English history, patience sets with art nouveau back designs, gilt-edged luxury editions for Harrods and other distinguished retailers. Goodall understood, long before the modern collector market existed, that a well-made deck of playing cards could be a genuine object of desire.

In 1921, Charles Goodall & Son was absorbed by De La Rue. The Camden Works closed in 1929. The buildings were eventually demolished. Today, nothing remains of the site where three-quarters of Britain's playing cards were once made.

What This Heritage Means To Us

We are not a heritage brand in the nostalgic sense - A. Haines Playing Cards is a living, working studio, hand-drawing original designs in Manchester and shipping them to collectors all over the world. But we are, in a way of thinking, the inheritors of a British tradition that De La Rue, Goodall and their contemporaries built up all those years ago.

When we draw the court cards for a new collection - as we did for the fully illustrated Love & Retribution series, set in Victorian Lancashire and featuring hand-drawn figures inhabiting a fictional manor house - we are working within a visual language that those Victorian craftsmen shaped. When we restore an antique deck, as we did with the Triton 42 Antique Restoration - painstakingly rebuilding the artwork of an 1890s New York Consolidated Card Company deck by hand - we are in direct conversation with that history. When we produce gilt-edged limited editions, numbered and hand-finished, we are doing what Goodall did for Harrods: making something that earns its place in a collection, and hopefully when the time is right, its place in history.

The great British card makers believed that playing cards could be more than functional objects. They believed in craft, in design, in the idea that the humble pack of cards was worth making beautiful. We share that belief completely. It is the founding principle of everything we make: designed and illustrated by hand in Manchester, with one eye always on the tradition we're proud to carry forward.

In fact, our first deck of playing cards, Imported Playing Cards, was an homage to this golden age of British playing card design, when decks were exported all over the world and branded with iconic import duty tax stamps and intricate wrappers. Watch out for our third Imported Playing Cards edition – Imported Playing Cards Burgundy Edition – coming in Q3 2026.

At A. Haines Playing Cards we are not just designing and selling playing cards, we are doing our best to bear the torch of the giants of old and establish a new legacy in British playing card design.

Ready to take a look at what we have created? Start right here

Why not take a look at our blog, The Art of the Gilded Deck: A Brief History of Gilt-Edged Playing Cards