Technology History | Wilford Industrial Estate, Nottingham — The Anti-Subscription Company Now Ships Free

Serif (Europe) Limited was incorporated on 1 April 1987 and has filed from Unit 12 on the Nottingham South and Wilford Industrial Estate for twenty-eight years.

It is a warehouse estate off Ruddington Lane, two miles south of the city centre, with a tram stop at the end of it.

Serif sold desktop publishing software to people who did not want to pay Adobe, first PagePlus and then the Affinity suite: Designer in 2014, Photo in 2015, Publisher in 2019.

Affinity's argument was the price model rather than the feature list. You bought the application once and it stayed bought, at a moment when Adobe had moved everything to Creative Cloud subscriptions.

That is what Canva acquired on 26 March 2024, for a figure reported at about US$380 million that Canva did not confirm at the time.

The deal started because Cameron Adams could not find anyone at Serif to talk to. He messaged the company on LinkedIn, told Fortune "I had to track them down!", reached managing director Ash Hewson, and was in Nottingham a week later.

Seven weeks passed between that message and the announcement, which Canva says is the fastest deal it has done.

The public register shows it slightly earlier. On 20 March 2024, six days before the announcement, an American director resident in Australia was appointed to Serif's board.

Canva and Serif then published a pledge: no forced subscriptions, perpetual licences honoured, free licences for schools and non-profits.

On 30 October 2025 the three applications were retired and replaced by a single free one, monetised through Canva's AI features for Pro subscribers.

The company built on refusing subscriptions now ships its software free inside one.

Companies House still gives the address as Unit 12, and the estate's units are not mapped individually, so this memory pins the estate rather than the unit.

The photographs show the directory board at the Ruddington Lane entrance and the estate road, where the photographer noted in 2008 that Serif's building is the grey one above the red car.

Photo: David Lally, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons