British Design brings together leading international scholars, designers and journalists to provide new perspectives on British design in the last sixty years, and how it at once looked back to the past with the continuation of traditions that spoke to Britain's design heritage, and looked forwards with the embrace of modernist and postmodernist style. The book responds to and develops new ways of understanding the recent history of design in Britain, with case studies on designed spaces and objects, including domestic interiors, retail spaces, schools and university buildings and transport. The contributors address significant moments and phenomena in the historical and social history of British design, from the rise and fall of the English Country House style and the Brutalist architectural boom of the 1960s to the modern shopping space, and consider the work of key contemporary designers ranging from Tommy Roberts to Thomas Heatherwick. British Design provides new criticism and analysis on how design, from the immediate post-war period to the present day, has developed and changed how we live and how we interact with the spaces in which we live. British Design is split into 13 chapters and is richly illustrated with 65 images, 16 of which are in full colour. Anyone who's wondered how the Britain of utility furniture and wartime rationing managed to evolve into 'Cool Britannia' will find this a remarkable book. The authors work from case studies, achieving a remarkably nuanced portrait of a country in transition. From the trend setting crafts for sale at the London boutique Primavera to the "fun furniture" available at Mr Freedom, the examples presented in this edited volume are like a breath of fresh air; they also provide a counterweight to older, decorous studies of British "good taste." The interiors of post-war country house decorators like John Fowler and modernist architects like Mary Crowley and David Medd receive equal treatment. British interior design emerges as transgressive and eccentric, romantic and--at its best--ingenious.