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Sir Kenneth Grange, Britain’s most prominent industrial designer, is busy and energetic despite turning 90 this year. He has just unveiled the newly designed Type 80 lighting for Anglepoise, featuring a gap halfway up the shade so that it is bathed in an ambient halo while still casting a focused beam. The range includes wall and pendant lights — as well as the archetypal Anglepoise desk lamp, whose ingenious mechanism remains, says Grange, “a minor miracle of function”.
But there is far more to Grange than lighting. He is the brains behind many of Britain’s most iconic, life-enhancing postwar designs, from the labour-saving 1960 Kenwood Chef food processor and futuristic InterCity 125 high-speed train of 1975 to London’s black cabs, which he redesigned in 1997. Over the years, he created Kodak cameras, Wilkinson Sword razors, Parker pens, Morphy Richards irons and Adshel bus shelters. Grange is known for modernising existing designs, rendering them sleeker and, crucially, more user-friendly — such as his 1996 redesign of Royal Mail’s rural postboxes to accommodate larger envelopes. His services to design earned him a knighthood in 2013, among countless other awards.
He has been design director of Anglepoise since 2003, and steward of the innovative spring-loaded desk lamp that is largely unchanged since its invention by automotive engineer George Carwardine in 1935.
Anglepoise was groundbreaking in the 1930s and continued to be redesigned until the 1970s, but it had been coasting since the 1980s. New owner Simon Terry hired Grange to refresh this utilitarian (albeit retro) design to reach a younger audience. Since then, Grange has augmented its range and his designs now account for 46 per cent of its portfolio. As well as contributing his own iterations of the light, he has injected glamour into the brand by enlisting fashion designers Sir Paul Smith and Margaret Howell — the latter a fervent fan of mid-century modernism — to give its classic models a colourful, contemporary update.
While Grange is concerned with functionality — almost above all else — he is no po-faced modernist judging by his home. Traditional cuckoo clocks hang at different heights in his dining room and he is a fervent admirer of the Memphis Group, the 1980s Italian design collective known for its vibrantly colourful furniture. His taste for pop extends to his work — in the yellow nose of a 125 train or the trademark tangerine accents of his Kenwood mixers.
There is a neat, uncanny circularity to Grange’s career. He understood springs from a young age. “My mother transmitted her interest in practicality to me,” says Grange. “She worked in a spring-making factory and loved it — she was very skilled at coiling springs by hand.”
Aged 18, Grange won a scholarship to study graphic design at Willesden College of Art, then honed his drawing skills as a technical illustrator during National Service with the Royal Engineers. He worked for several forward-thinking architects in London — an exhilarating entry to modernism, then seen as an antidote to postwar austerity. “It was all so far from the brown and cream of my parents’ home,” he says.
Before setting up his own design studio in 1956, Grange worked for architect Jack Howe, a former assistant to Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus School. Howe’s practice also designed street lighting, bus shelters and clocks.
While there, Grange’s career took off thanks to a combination of serendipity and his enthusiasm while working on an exhibition stand for Kodak at the Brussels World Fair. “I remember saying aloud, ‘This would be a nice job if the products weren’t so bloody ugly’ ,” he says. He was overheard: “That evening Kodak’s sales director phoned me and said, “I understand you’re designing a camera for us’ .” It was the start of a 30-year collaboration.
Grange benefited from his association with the Design Council, which played a key role in promoting “good design” in postwar Britain. “It introduced designers to manufacturers and I was on its list,” he says. He was commissioned in 1958 to design Britain’s first parking meter and his first Kenwood food mixer — he had only four days to redesign the antiquated machines, but went on to achieve phenomenal success. “Its great advantage is its solidity,” said the journalist Shirley Conran at the time. “It doesn’t shake and charge about all over the room. It hums efficiently, instead of clattering.” In 1972, Grange co-founded Pentagram, which is now a multinational design agency.
Grange — a visiting tutor at London’s Royal College of Art until last year — has strong views on contemporary design. He decries today’s “unremitting commercial call for novelty” and what he perceives as a preference for the faddish rather than the functional. “For buyers, the number one requirement is a low price,” he says. This means that changes to contemporary designs are “more and more superficial”. What consumers really appreciate is “any material improvement in the function of a thing, which rarely happens.”
One of his own elegant white toasters sits in his kitchen. There are almost no major differences between it and models designed 10 years ago, he says. Is that because all its practical elements have been resolved? “Yes, to an adequate level,” says Grange. “But to the best of my knowledge, there’s been no analysis of the different types of bread that go into toasters nowadays.”
He also points out that many everyday objects are poorly designed for elderly users. “I struggle on a daily basis with simple controls. When you get older you realise how inconvenient many products are,” he says.
Do older people make better designers because they are more aware of these shortcomings? Grange thinks so. “A degree of infirmity encourages you to make almost anything better from a user’s point of view.”
Nevertheless, he strongly approves of the majority of those working in the design industry: “People go into it out of love, not to earn a good living.”
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How does he see the future of design? “I sense there’s more of an interest in products with a long life. That is certainly the case with Anglepoise.” At this point, he suggests we explore his living room, an orderly but comfortable space furnished with design classics such as Charles and Ray Eames’s lounge chair and ottoman.
He is particularly proud of his first design for Anglepoise: the Type 3 desk lamp. It used a dual-layered shade that offered protection from the heat of the then-popular 100W bulbs. The lamp has since gone out of production, because cool LED lights have superseded hot incandescent bulbs.
I also spot a Kenwood mixer in his kitchen. “It’s not one of my designs,” he admits. “But none of the interfaces have changed in the past 30 or 40 years. The only thing that’s new is its digital control.”
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