Graphic Journey Blog

British by Design

Along with Michael Wolff, Lucienne Roberts, Jonathan Drori and Cecilia Martin, I will be part this design panel to discuss the emigre graphic designers who came to the UK during WW2 and their subsequent influence during the 1950's onwards.

Designed by FHK Henrion 1944

It is tonight at at the
Jewish Museum London,
Raymond Burton House,
129-131 Albert Street, London NW1 7NB.
The nearest tube station is Camden Town

I have 5 free tickets for anyone that would like to come along tonight
at 7p.m.

Contact me via email: mike@studiodempsey.co.uk

 

Flashback to the mid-20th century

You know those odd coincidences when you’re writing or typing and are thinking of just the right word and, as if by magic, that word is simultaneously mouthed by someone on the radio, just as it appeared in your head? Or perhaps a film, painting or book comes to mind and two minutes later it turns up in a magazine or while flicking through a book? Over the years, it has happened to me at an alarming rate – some two or three times a day. I have always felt rather blessed by this personal phenomenon, as it has proved so useful on many occasions. 

Last year, I noticed a Facebook post for an exhibition of the illustrator Brian Sanders, in particular his work on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. I thought “hmmm, I must remember that”. Then it went completely out of my mind. Next day, I am taking a walk in my neighbourhood and I stumble on a small gallery I hadn’t noticed before, called the Lever Gallery. I looked in the window and what should I see but the Brian Sanders show I’d noticed on Facebook. It was fortuitous because not only did I see the show, and very good it was too, but I also met the gallery director, Didier Madoc-Jones. During a conversation about the exhibition, I told him that I recalled other illustrators working on 2001: A Space Odyssey at the company I worked at back in the 1960s. He then took me into the gallery’s storeroom to show me the wonderful collection of illustrators’ work from that period. 

Original artwork by Gianluigi Coppola.

Original artwork for 'Wages of Fear by Pino Dell'Orco

As he flipped through the large illustration boards, I was reconnected with some work that had passed through my hands some 53 years earlier, when I was working as the in-house designer at artist agents Bryan Colmer & Partners. It was an odd and rather nostalgic feeling, especially viewing original artwork again by two of the very best illustrators from that period, Michael Johnson and Renato Frattini.

Original artwork by Renato Renato Frattini.

Original artwork by Michael Johnson.

I felt that same tingle of excitement at seeing them again. A few days later, I met with Didier Madoc-Jones again to discuss his plans for the gallery and to unload my memories from that very special period of British creativity. Over the following week, I agreed to support the gallery and act as an advisor. I had personal knowledge of the period and people and was happy to pass it on for a good cause. A few months on from that first meeting, I have redesigned the gallery’s identity and styled the print material.

New logotype for the gallery.

Poster for the new exhibition at the Lever Gallery featuring an illustration by Michael Johnson from 1963.

The first iteration of this brings me to a new show at the Lever Gallery: ‘Uncovered: Illustrating the Sixties and Seventies’ is a mixed show featuring a small group of illustrators, including the outstanding Michael Johnson and Renato Frattini. For me, Johnson was the British illustrator of the early 1960s. He, Frattini and others in this show were represented by Bryan Colmer & Partners, where my job was to take the illustrations commissioned for book jackets or paperback covers and design the typography. Very few publishers had art directors back then, so they needed someone to do this seemingly mundane job. It involved copious amounts of Letraseting and, in my case, being a bit geeky, buying copies of Twen magazine in order to cut out the blocks of its headline typeface, Schmalfette Grotesk, unavailable in the UK at that time (As it happens the very same typeface I have used on the 'Uncovered' poster above) . But this early submersion in typography stood me in good stead, as it was to become a lifelong passion. As a wet-behind-the-ears 20-something, I was in awe of these super-talented and rather glamorous illustrators. I remember going to some kind of publishing function at the Royal Garden Hotel, at which Renato Frattini was staying and had a large suite. Nervous, shy and way out of my depth, I kept drinking every glass of wine offered to me by the passing waiters until I passed out, waking up in the early hours on a sofa in Frattini’s suite; apparently, I’d been carried there out of harm’s way. Such was my youth. 

So, this delightful new show has vividly transported me back to those heady analogue days, in full glorious colour, rifling through those wonderful illustrations, created over half a century ago. 

The exhibition ‘Uncovered: Illustrating the Sixties and Seventies’ runs from 1st February to 24th March 2018

Lever Gallery, 153-157 Goswell Road, London, EC1V 7HD

Darkest Hour / Winston’s wanderings

An unrecognisable Garry Oldman as Winston Churchill.

There’s no doubt about Garry Oldman’s performance as Winston Churchill in Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour, but the film itself is a case of style over substance, with the addition of some downright embarrassing moments in the script.

Along with Oldman goes full marks, and no doubt awards, for the outstanding prosthetic designers, cinematography, costumes, and art direction. But what destroyed this film for me was Wright’s overindulgence in visual gimmickry. Endless plan-view zooms, both in and out, of stairwells, aerial shots and bombing. Unnecessary close-ups of the passing objects. Slow-motion panning shots of street scenes showing background extras, looking like background extras being far too self-conscious, along with overly clean period cars, and some of those were post-war models.

The self-consciousness of the extras was heightened by the use of slow motion and car boffins would spot the post-war Ford Anglia (far left). A silly mistake when so many prewar models would have been readily available from enthusiasts.

But far worse were two dreadfully sentimental and questionable scenes. The first is the unlikely close relationship between Churchill and his overly pretty typist/secretary Elizabeth Layton – it smacks of being manufactured by committee.

The rather more glamorous Elizabeth Layton (played by Lily James ) than the genuine Elizabeth below.

The second is an absolutely ludicrous scene when Churchill goes AWOL at a crucial moment when he is being pressured into peace talks with “Herr Hitler” via Mussolini to avert the impending Dunkirk massacre. To help with the taxing dilemma, Winston decides to join “the ordinary people” on an underground train.

"Cor blimey! It's Mr Churchill anall".

The trigger for this event is at the opening of the film, when Winston, cosseted in the back of his chauffeur-driven car, looks out at a bus and says “You know, I have never travelled on a bus”. Fast forward to the end of the film and we have Winston sitting in a crowded tube carriage, complete with Homburg hat and Havana cigar, where he canvasses views on the mood of the country from the ridiculously humble London passengers. It is like a jaunty, forelock-tugging, Enfield/Whitehouse 1940s sketch. Utterly laughable.

"We're with you all the way, Gor bless you Mr Churchill Sir".

Within this lavishness, there could have been a great film. But it is marred by visual over stimulation and a very patchy script.

Bruno Ganz as Hitler in Downfall 2004.

You only have to view Oliver Hirschbiegel’s brilliant film Downfall to see how a serious historical subject can be handled with great skill and subtlety, without an ounce of sentimentality or visual gymnastics, to understand what I am on about. Wright seems to have picked up Stephen Spielberg’s irritating habit of inserting syrup-driven sentimentality into his films. And, incidentally, you’ll find that in Spielberg’s latest The Post.

Often, when directors get to a stage in their careers when they have all the tricks made available, they tend to want to show them. It reminds me of a quote from the late great advertising man Bill Bernbach, who warned creatives not to gild the lily:

“Be provocative. But be sure your provocativeness stems from your product... Merely to let your imagination run riot, to dream unrelated dreams, to indulge in graphic acrobatics is not being creative. The creative person has harnessed his imagination. He has disciplined it so that every thought, every idea, every word he puts down, every line he draws... makes more vivid, more believable, more persuasive...”

I think Bill knew what he was talking about. Less is always more, and Darkest Hour could have been a superior film had Joe Wright adhered to that, along with using a sturdy pair of scissors to cut out the duff scenes.

Architecture: Living in the past

Dorset's grandest Waitrose in Poundbury, Dorset.

I have been living in Dorset since the late 1980’s. Ten miles north of my home is the town of Dorchester, famed for the great novelist Thomas Hardy and also the birth of trade unionism, with those six Tolpuddle Martyrs arrested on trumped-up charges and marched to the town to await trial in 1834 and their eventual deportation to Australia. 

Another less significant event but with some impact started 24 years ago. Just a few miles west of Dorchester, the first houses of a new development appeared. It’s called Poundbury: the brainchild of future monarch Prince Charles and originally master-planned by the urban theorist and planner Léon Krier in the 1980s. With a cohort of ardent neoclassical architects (Quinlan and Francis Terry, James Gorst, John Simpson and Ben Pentreath) on board, the planned project is 50% completed. In the not-too-distant future, Poundbury will, I feel sure, dwarf the main town in size. 

Variations of residences.

It is the realisation of Prince Charles’s particular take on architecture, and the resulting development is loved and loathed in equal measures. This model town consists of 35% social housing; is apparently designed as a sustainable development (including being carbon-neutral); and sits proudly facing Maiden Castle, a historic Iron Age hill fort. 

Over the years, I have followed Poundbury’s progress with interest. Every six months or so, I drive around its ever-expanding streets to look at vistas new. The place is now filled with every conceivable variation on 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century faux architectural styles, from Scottish baronial villas to Palladian mansions and from flint-clad cottages to miniature icing pink Gothic castles. More recently, Victorian ‘Shad Thames’-style warehouses have appeared, along with white-rendered Rennie Mackintosh facsimiles. Think of Sir Clough Williams-Ellis’s creation Portmeirion in Wales, built between 1925 and 1975 in the style of an Italian village (made famous in the TV series ‘The Prisoner’), and you’ll get the picture.

The genesis of Poundbury, Sir Clough Williams-Ellis’s Portmeirion in Wales created in 1925.

Another inspiration, Seaside in Miami USA built in 1982 designed by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.

Two images of Thamestown in Shanghai, China built in 2006.

It is the kind of model town replica that you find in gated communities in the US (Seaside in Miami was an early inspiration) or elsewhere, such as Thamestown in Shanghai, created in 2006 to give Chinese visitors a little piece of cobblestoned Tudor England, without having to leave their country. 

Some variations in Poundbury's homes.

Dorset’s Poundbury has been described by the Ray-Ban-sunglasses-wearing architectural writer Jonathan Meades as a “cottagey slum” and a “Thomas Hardy theme park for slow learners”. He doesn’t mince words, that Mr Meades. But I feel sure that the young/old fogey Jacob Rees-Mogg would feel very much at home here amid the Hunter-wellies-wearing, Labrador-walking, Farrow & Ball inhabitants.

I was firmly against the notion of a pastiche town: Dorset’s own Disneyland. But while there are downsides (and I’ll come to those a little later), there are many things that I actually like. As I toured around last week, I was struck by the clever organic flow of the place and the juxtaposition of sizes and styles that rub together in a rather pleasing way. There are increasingly more focal points that help to lead you to central areas. The roads are wide and there are no yellow parking restriction lines to be found anywhere. Signage is kept to a minimum and the shops have discreet branding. The building materials used are a myriad of variations of real Portland and reconstituted stone, flint, and varieties of every conceivable brick colour and texture; some houses have blocked out windows to replicate the window tax era of the 17th–19th centuries. There is a great deal of painted fibreglass too, aping decorative cast iron. Standing in the middle of it all, you could be forgiven for imagining that you were on a Hollywood backlot. It is all clever movie-production-style fakery. 

The first buildings that went up in Poundbury back in the ’90s lacked finesse, with details rather too chunky, like mean-sized windows with overly chunky glassing bars. Many of those early dwellings are now showing signs of wear and tear in this fairly high up and exposed part of Dorset. But as the development has evolved, newer architects have appeared on the scene with keener eyes for detail. One of these is Ben Pentreath: a neoclassicist but with a modern twist, rather like his hero, the late interior designer David Hicks. Pentreath trained at the Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture, going on to work a five-year stint in New York and then with the Prince’s Foundation. So, it’s no surprise that he is well immersed in helping to realise this later phase of development of Poundbury with many other like-minded practitioners.

One of Ben Pentreath's creations in Poundbury.

But if you look outside of this regal utopia at the many smaller developments dotted around Dorset, you will find either miserable little redbrick boxes akin to the old TV soap ‘Brookside’ slapped up by Wimpey or Barratt Homes for maximum profit for minimum effort or equally small local-stone-built affairs to approximate a regional feel.

This is the typical alternatively new builds to Poundbury. Grim little boxes.

Zero design aesthetic. Minimum effort for maximum profit. These are to be found from John O' Groats to Land's End.

But all are mean-spirited and soulless. What remains tugs on the coattails of Prince Charles’s ‘Little England’ view of the world. There is not one notable contemporary development of merit. So, I guess if I had to make a choice between the incredibly depressing Brookside boxes or the Poundbury film set, I’d choose the latter. No, I wouldn’t: I’d keep looking. But it sums up the depressing state of 21st-century British domestic architecture.

What saddens me is that had the Poundbury idea been put in the hands of a group of really exciting contemporary architects, with a real interest in developing new thinking in domestic architecture, it could have been fantastic. You’ll find an example of what I mean in Harlow, Essex, in a scheme designed by architect Alison Brooks.

Alison Brooks Architects new builds in Harlow in Essex.

She has taken her inspiration for the old black-tarred wooden Essex barns for her affordable housing scheme. Architects like her, Stanton Williams, Studio Partington and Hamson Barron Smith, along with a bunch of Scandinavian and Japanese architects, create modern, people-centred homes, rather than the egotistical ‘trophy building’ lot, who are screwing up London’s skyline at every turn.

Above a range of domestic home designs from the UK, Europe, US and Japan showing the alternative possibilities to living in the past.

While I’m at it, back in Dorchester, there is a so-called ‘contemporary’ development being built on the site of the old Eldridge Pope brewery. But cutting-edge modernism it ain’t: it is altogether mundane and extremely disappointing in appearance and is another lost architectural opportunity for the county. 

Above part of Dorchester's very disappointing architectural design for Brewery Square development.

What amuses me most about Poundbury is that is at its heart and at the highest point of the centre of the town is a Waitrose – no way could it have been a Lidl. It started its life as a ‘little Waitrose’, but last year it expanded to three times its original size, packed to the hilt with Duchy produce in every aisle and with its own cafe, where customers clad in Barbour puffer jackets and cavalry twill or heavyweight Yorkshire corduroy trousers sit sipping their free coffees while reading The Telegraph. It is a microcosm and a seeming bastion of retired, well-heeled, white, middle-class middle Englanders, waiting patiently to get their country back in 2019 from those ghastly foreigners. 

The Queen Mother looks down on her grandson's creation.

And as one looks through the Waitrose cafe windows, just beyond to Queen Mother Square, there stands a giant statue of the late queen mother looking down on passers-by to reinforce the feeling that all is well and that one is perfectly safe and secure in Dorset’s Poundbury.

No, it's not Jonathan Meads in the shades by Prince Charles on one of his regular visits to his model town.

Amazingly, after all of Prince Charles’s views about modernist architecture, made abundantly clear in his 1988 BBC documentary ‘A Vision of Britain’, he is now, along with Léon Krier, apparently planning a new project: a small modernist town. Krier added: “We will show them how to do it.” 

Watch this space.

Since writing this post The Guardian published an interesting piece on the future of home building in the UK.