The origin of this font was a frieze in the RAF Chapel in Westminster Abbey which Michael Harvey was commissioned to design and create.

It was comprised of the names of the top brass in Bomber Command, namely Dowding, Harris, Newall, Tedder, Portal and Douglas. The Brief was to cut the letters in bronze and guild them. Instead, they were cut in perspex and guilded.

To sit comfortably within the long and narrow space available beneath the chapel’s stained glass window, extended letterforms were used with many vertical serifs omitted and with lengthened horizontal serifs.

Some twenty years later, the missing upper-case letters were drawn together with the lower-case letters and Frieze, the font, was born. Subsequently, other weights and styles were added to create a font family of six styles.