Table Of ContentREVOLUTION
INTERIOR DESIGN
FROM 1950
Drew Plunkett
Revolution: Interior Design from 1950
© RIBA Enterprises Ltd. 2016
Published by RIBA Publishing, part of RIBA Enterprises Ltd, The Old Post Office,
St Nicholas Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 1RH
ISBN 978 1 85946 592 9 / 978 1 85946 722 0 (PDF)
The right of Drew Plunkett to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 sections 77 and 78.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the copyright owner.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Commissioning Editor: Elizabeth Webster
Production: Richard Blackburn
Designed and typeset by HD-design
Printed and bound by W&G Baird Ltd in Great Britain
While every effort has been made to check the accuracy and quality of the information
given in this publication, neither the Author nor the Publisher accept any responsibility
for the subsequent use of this information, for any errors or omissions that it may
contain, or for any misunderstandings arising from it.
www.ribaenterprises.com
Revolution: inteRioR Design fRom 1950
Contents
Acknowledgements iv
IntroductIon 1
chApter 1: In the begInnIng 3
chApter 2: the tImes they were A-chAngIn’ 19
chApter 3: AnxIetIes And AllusIons 41
chApter 4: grIm down south 51
chApter 5: bIg bAng 67
chApter 6: bIg beAsts 77
chApter 7: the next generAtIon 103
chApter 8: shoppIng gets serIous 129
chApter 9: And Ar begAt dJ 141
chApter 10: storms In teAcups 155
chApter 11: to the 1990s And beyond 163
chApter 12: educAtIon lIte 183
chApter 13: All chAnge 191
chApter 14: onwArd And InwArd 203
endnotes 205
ImAge credIts 215
Index 216
Acknowledgements
The author thanks all those who shared their knowledge, experiences and opinions in formal
interviews. They are Kevin Brennan, Adam Brinkworth, Dinah Casson, Max Clendinning, Nigel
Coates, David Connor, David Dalziel, Pierre d’Avoine. Rasshied Din, David Fern, George Freeman,
Natalie Gibson, Nigel Green, Tim Greenhalgh, Terry Gunnery, Steve Jensen, Eva Jiricna, Brian
Johnson, Ben Kelly, Gabriel Murray, Julian Powell-Tuck, Iain Watson, Jon Weallans and
Michael Wolff.
He is also grateful to those who offered information and opinion informally. They include Ralph
Adron, Sinead Black, Sam Booth, Graeme Brooker, Josephine Cicero, Nick Coombe, Lindesay
Dawe, Sally Greaves-Lord, Iain Higgins, Brian Kernaghan, Michael Loates-Taylor, Patrick Macklin,
Jason Milne, Bill Moultrie, Grace Patton, Olga Reid, Ab Rogers, Carolyn Sceales, Angus Shepherd,
Andrew Stone, Lindsay Taylor and Andrew White.
He is indebted to those photographers who waived their fees and all those who searched archives
for images of projects that have long since vanished.
iv
reVolutIon: InterIor desIgn From 1950
‘Without history we would be like babies left in
baskets on doorsteps – with no idea of our origins . . .
we would have an identity crisis.’
Bevis Hillier1
IntroductIon
Arguments are made for cave painters, tapestry hangers and 20th century decorators as the first
interior practitioners, but examination of those or any other antecedents will reveal very little about
the profession today.
The history of the current model of practice may be brief, but enough time has passed to make
objective appraisal possible, and important. The economic imperatives that determine the life of
interiors raze even the best with a rapidity unknown in architecture. Most of the influential interiors
of the last few decades have already vanished, but accelerated destruction has led to accelerated
evolution, offering enough evidence – primarily experiential and anecdotal – with which to construct
an analytical history.
Published histories have not recognised the particular character and importance of the period from
the 1950s to the present, preferring to expediently link interior design to architectural movements.
It is not enough to pick up theoretical scraps from the architects’ table; more important is to
understand the social and economic changes that have nudged interior design practice away from
architecture towards the territory in which it now operates.
It is a story that begins quietly. This history will not deny umbilical links to architecture but will show
how interior design’s more populist priorities, guided by antennae that are necessarily finely tuned
to social phenomena and ephemera and are tested and validated in the marketplace, have shaped a
broadly parallel but distinctive canon. The recollections, reflections and opinions of some of the most
significant practitioners will help establish a narrative and insight, and the writings of architectural
and design journalists will set out the values, and prejudices, of the time.
It is a story of talented and ambitious provincials going to London to find opportunities and to transform
what they found; of people who perplexed careers advisors but went on to define a new career.
It is a story of clients with entrepreneurial visions and business acumen who chose mostly unknown
designers and gave them freedom. Together they created a benign monster and the interior
profession had to grow, and change, to serve it. It could no longer be a cottage industry.
1
1
In the
begInnIng:
1945-55
1 in the beginning: 1945-55
The years following the second world war were packed into sublet rooms and shared inadequate washing
hard for Britain. While the country could take and cooking provision. The most desperate resorted to
satisfaction from victory, it was weakened and no squatting, sometimes in the deserted shells of grand town
better off materially than defeated and occupied houses, sometimes in the corrugated tin huts built as
nations. Exhilaration at the war’s end was quickly tempered wartime billets. The government, with nothing else to offer,
by the realisation that day-to-day existence would remain tolerated the initiative.
blighted by restrictions and deprivations, some even more
In 1944 Churchill had talked of providing half a million
severe than those of the war years. Shortages of food, fuels
prefabricated homes and these compact, factory-produced
and raw materials continued into the mid-1950s. Economic
units did deliver something substantial and comparatively
recovery was fragile, and slow.
long-term. For those who had lived in pre-war slums the
There was initial optimism that pre-war privations, warm, dry, self-contained ‘prefabs’ with well-appointed
inadequate housing, poor health care, and uncertainty kitchens and indoor lavatories offered a first experience of
about employment would be eliminated by a new Labour dwellings that transcended dire expediency, despite their
government elected on the strength of a manifesto that modest dimensions. Architects engaged in arguments
promised fundamental social reform. about the merits of high-rise flats versus terraced and
semi-detached two-storey houses. Those waiting to be
Change – and the promise of change – did not bring
rehoused overwhelmingly favoured the traditional but
harmony. Workers expected to do less work for more
architects and planners, fired up by Corbusian imagery
pay. Empathy with the new administration’s ideals did
and rhetoric, favoured point blocks. By September 1948,
not prevent strikes, which further inhibited economic
a quarter of a million council homes had been built, with a
growth and exacerbated supply problems. The egalitarian
bias towards high-rise.
sentiments that had evolved during the war mandated
social reform but, with hindsight, economic reconstruction Efficient production of prefabs owed a lot to mass
should perhaps have been given priority. production methods honed by the pragmatism of war.
While many manufacturing industries failed to recognise
School building and changes to the structure of secondary
threats from the far east, innovators saw the potential of
education were crucial elements in the government’s
new materials and processes. Esavian, which had supplied
reform agenda, but even more significant was the launch
everything from school books to folding partitions before
of the National Health Service in 1948. This provided free
the war, adapted the aluminium and plywood technologies
medical services for all, and the newly built hospitals and
of aircraft manufacture to produce the furniture that
health centres spoke of modern efficiency while their
became standard in the school building programme.
interiors made gestures towards visual enhancement with
Innovative lightweight chairs and desks, designed by Jim
murals, sculptures and pictures used in public spaces.
Leonard, were featured in Domus magazine and served to
The Financial Times warned from the outset that the
give the future furniture buyers of the 1960s and 1970s
economy could not support the proposed medical provision
their first taste of modernity.
and, when treatment became free in 1948, demand,
inflated by a rush for remedies unaffordable before the war,
exceeded predictions. Charges were quickly introduced for
Boosting Morale
the services of opticians and dentists.
Building materials were included in post-war rationing The winter of 1946-47 was spectacularly severe. Blocked
until 1954 and existing housing stock, which had been roads and railways stopped coal getting to power stations,
bombed or neglected in favour of other wartime priorities, some of which had to shut down. Domestic electricity was
could not meet the expectations of a settled peacetime restricted to 19 hours a day and industrial supplies were
population. Bombing had left two-and-a-quarter million cut entirely. Radio broadcasting was limited and television
people homeless. Some squeezed in with relatives; others service, suspended at the outbreak of war, was again put on
4
ReVOLUtiOn: inteRiOR DeSign FROM 1950
hold. Newspapers were reduced in size and some magazine
production stopped. Food distribution was affected and
vegetables were frozen in the ground. Inevitably, the mid-
March thaw brought flooding. Public morale was low and, for
many, insult was added to injury when, in February, Christian
Dior revealed his ‘New Look’. While for some its long and
voluminous silhouettes offered a seductive alternative to
the abbreviated hemlines and shapes imposed by wartime
textile rationing, for others they represented an unpatriotic
waste of fabric. That the New Look originated in Paris,
spared bombing by defeat and occupation, aggravated
the offence.
The problem of national morale, and the unpopularity
of continued rationing coupled with little evidence of
economic recovery, prompted the government to develop
the Royal Society of Arts’ 1943 proposal for an event to
commemorate the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851.
In 1945 it was decided that an international exhibition would
be too expensive and the priority should be reconstruction
on the home front. Instead, a ‘Festival of Britain’ was
proposed, which would feature homegrown arts and
sciences: ‘One united act of national reassessment and one
corporate reaffirmation of faith in the nation’s future.’1 Its South African Tourist Corporation’s office, Piccadilly,
director, Gerald Barry, is generally credited with describing London. James Cubitt & Partners, 1950.
it more concisely, and less portentously, as a ‘tonic to the Details that typified the Festival of Britain and the rest of
the 1950s: the timber-slatted, undulating ceiling, patterned,
nation’. This lightness of touch was to characterise the
plastic laminate floor, and potted plants were already
festival’s buildings and artefacts. established in progressive interiors in expensive and
fashionable areas of the city.
Events were organised in cities and towns throughout the
United Kingdom and Northern Ireland. An exhibition ship, the
Campania, toured the coast throughout the summer; on land, London had a number of museum exhibitions and an area
a travelling show focused on industrial design. There were of the Lansbury Estate, a public housing development in
misgivings about the festival’s likelihood of success but, on East London, served as an example of architectural
completion, even those who had forecast bathos admitted aspirations. The centrepiece of the whole event was the
to excitement. Ten million visitors experienced emerging temporary South Bank Exhibition on a Thames-side site
design ideas, and those who would not normally find previously devoted to warehouses and working-class
themselves among the shops and showrooms of London’s dwellings. It involved the reclamation of 1.8 hectares from
West End had a taste of what the future might be. Beyond the river, and its buildings and elevated walkways gave
the festival small businesses were reluctant to Britain its first readily accessible experience of Modernist
invest in new interiors, but big business was more willing. architecture and planning. It was all the more powerful
Many of the more interesting experiments took place in because it sat in the centre of a city still punctuated
exhibition stands, which provided freedom to push ideas far by bomb craters. Hugh Casson, aged 38 at the time, was
beyond the restraints of permanent construction techniques. appointed its director of architecture in 1948. He had just
Governments, keen to promote tourism, provided generous the right degree of amiable whimsicality to ensure that the
budgets and encouraged innovative solutions. physical manifestation of the festival was indeed festive.
5
