The British Royal Mail has issued a set of ten stamps celebrating 20th-century British design classics.
The first Mini rolled off production lines 50 years ago. Sir Alec Issigonis’s revolutionary car became an icon of the 60s and remains one of the most striking and familiar pieces of British design.
Strictly speaking, Concorde is an Anglo-French design classic, having been jointly created by BAC and Aérospatiale. Rumours still abound that Russia’s Tupolev Tu-144 (or Concordski) was developed from blueprints obtained through espionage.
Mary Quant developed the miniskirt for her Kings Road boutique Bazaar after a long period of experimenting with shorter skirts and dresses.
London Transport’s Routemaster bus symbolises London across the world and that awkward time when you could take it to go to “Solanas”.
Another design tied to the capital, Harry Beck’s elegant solution to the problems posed by the complexity of the London Underground was inspired by circuit diagrams, and established design principles that remain relevant today.
RJ Mitchell died before his Supermarine Spitfire even went into production. The plane’s elliptical wings gave it a higher speed than most of its contemporaries as well as an iconic silhouette.
One of the first products to exploit the potential of injection moulding, Robin Day’s ingenious stacking chair is so ubiquitous that the refinement of its design is easy to miss.
Famous for Battersea Power Station and Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral, Giles Gilbert Scott followed architectural cues in his submission to the GPO’s competition to design a telephone kiosk. The K2 was an instant design classic.
In the world of publishing, cover designs have rarely been so immediately iconic as Allen Lane’s Penguin classics series, designed by Edward Young, perfected by Jan Tschichold and featuring Eric Gill’s immortal Gill Sans typeface.
George Carwardine’s Anglepoise lamp sprung from his background in designing suspension systems for cars, and uses springs to replicate the function of human muscles.
Each of this stamps deserves its own post. That will happen because they are truly fascinating.
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