Modern Design in 1930s Britain

The ’30s would not seem the most propitious time for design, with companies recovering from the depression in the first few years, and preparing for war in the last few. Yet it was in the 1930s that, in Britain, the government gave full acknowledgement to the contribution design could make to the economy of the country by setting up the Gorrell Committee from which would eventually morph the Council of Industrial Design; the Royal Society of Arts established its Royal Designer of Industry awards; and the designers themselves gathered together to form the Society of Industrial Artists to be their professional body.

Then came the influx of persecuted designers from Europe seeking a haven, galvanising British designers for a while towards the ‘modern’ – the simple, the unadorned, the ‘fit for purpose’ – the British eventually accepting only a compromise stand, a ‘conservative modernism’.