Gill had begun cutting letters in stone during his first few months at Westminster Technical Institute. He was simultaneously learning writing and studying the Roman alphabet with Edward Johnston at the L.C.C. Central School of Arts and Crafts. These twin influences worked together to persuade him to give up his planned profession as an architect and become a lettercutter and monumental mason.

In the Gill workshops at Pigotts near High Wycombe the cutting of inscriptions remained the staple of activity and was indeed the primary source of income. Amongst the works completed during this period were the memorials to the writers John Galsworthy and A.R. Orage, the artists William Orpen and Christopher Wood, the well-known portrait panel for Lord Rutherford in Cambridge, and the memorial to the Admiral of the Fleet Charles Edward Madden in St. Paul's Cathedral.

As well as the excitement and vitality of the busy workshop Kindersley the apprentice absorbed the protocols of death and burial. This was to stand him in good stead in his own practice. It was Kindersley himself who cut the inscription ET ALIAS OVES on the Hopton Wood stone demonstration panel designed by Gill and exhibited at the French Gallery in London in November 1936.

Kindersley's apprenticeship with Gill reversed completely his earlier months of working with the traditional 'trade' carvers, the brothers Udini in Fulham. Where the Udinis used the pointing machine to enlarge and convert into stone the plaster models made by the many Royal Academicians who used their services, Gill denounced such practices as pusillanimous and ungodly.

In 1945 Kindersley moved to Cambridge, establishing his first fully-fledged lettercutting workshop at Dales Barn in the village of Barton. This was a time of stylistic liberation for Kindersley, in which he broke away from Gill in his decorative embellishments of cutting, in his growing predilection for lettering on slate and the combination of lettering with heraldry. But in the organisation of the workshop, and his aims for it, the sense of dynastic inheritance was strong.

'What is a Workshop? It is a place where workers work and build a microcosm of life. It is in many ways like a temple, a place of rethinking and dedication, echoing each passing day and adjusting to the demands of its hitherto unknown clientele.' David Kindersley 'Letters Slate Cut'

The drawing, cutting, painting and fixing in position became a workshop ritual in which not just Kindersley and his assistants but the client, whose involvement was seen as the completion of the almost mystic triangle, all shared. Working out from this disciplined framework David Kindersley designed a number of typefaces and devised a computerised typesetting system, translating Ruskinian ideals of creative individuality and human judgment into 20th century technology.

The survival of a workshop culture in a post-war climate of industrial expansion preoccupied Kindersley through the 1950s and 1960s when he was a leading figure in the Designer Craftsman Society and the Crafts Council of Great Britain. of which he eventually became Chairman.

It is one of the crucially important things about David Kindersley that he was able to rise above the mystique of the 20th century craft workshop, built up around a central charismatic male practitioner (Eric Gill was a prime example, whose workshop was compared by visitors to a Renaissance atelier) and to acknowledge Lida Lopes Cardozo, a much younger, extraordinarily talented Dutch letter cutter, not just as his apprentice and later as his wife but as a genuine creative equal.