Sculptor and letterer born in London, the eldest child of the stone carver and letterer, David Kindersley, and his first wife, Christine (née Sharpe). He attended Cambridge School of Art and trained in his father’s stone carving workshop, and in 1970 set up his own studio in Kennington, south London. He was a visiting lecturer at the City and Guilds of London Art School, and until 2014 led students on annual spring trips to Rome, Naples and Pompeii to study carved inscriptions. He was a member of the Art Workers’ Guild, the Letter Exchange and the Wynkyn de Worde Society, was a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (by whom he was awarded the Art for Architecture Award), and in 2001 was made an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. Throughout his working life he won major sculpture and lettering commissions for many public and private bodies. His public sculptures include a decorative plaque in lead, 1975, for Northcote House, University of Exeter; The Seven Ages of Man, 1980, a ‘totem pole’ in cold cast aluminium for Baynard House, City of London; The Innocence of Childhood, c.1998, a brick carving giving a child’s eye view of a busy street, on the Raphael Street underpass in Knightsbridge; Two Rivers, c.2001, a brick carving alluding to the location of the Two Rivers shopping centre, Staines, Surrey, at the confluence of the Wraysbury and Colne rivers shortly before they join the Thames; Emigration Stone, 2002, an upright slab in Caithness stone bearing an inscription commemorating those who departed for the New World at the time of the Highland Clearances in the 1830s and ’40s, Cromarty, Scotland; the Dunblane Massacre Standing Stone, 2009, Dunblane Cathedral, Scotland; and all the lettering for the architect Liam O’Connor’s British Normandy Memorial, overlooking Gold Beach at Ver-sur-Mer, France (completed 2021). Kindersley died on 27 November 2025 and is survived by his second wife, Katherine, and their two sons, Daniel and Matthew, and his son from his first marriage, Peter.
ibliography: Cavanagh, T., Public Sculpture of Leicestershire and Rutland, Liverpool, 2000; T. Harrod, ‘Richard Kindsley obituary’, The Guardian (online), 2 January 2026; Richard Kindersley website; Ward-Jackson, P., Public Sculpture of the City of London, Liverpool, 2003.
Terry Cavanagh November 2022; updated January 2026
