Beginning at the bench: interview with Gordon Russell

Gordon Russell was one of the doyens of 20th century British design. He was also iconoclastic in his opinions about it. I talked to him at his cottage in Gloucestershire

PHOTO CREDIT: BARRY LEWIS.

Gordon Russell is 88. He sits in a wheelchair and can’t use his hands owing to muscular trouble; but his speech is witty and animated, his eyes twinkling. And his advice to today’s young designers is forceful too: ‘So many design students think that heaven’s going to rain down big fat jobs. It doesn’t. Jobs only come from hard work. You have to have a go, find things out and not wait for work to be put in your lap.

‘After the war, every designer thought that business would get better overnight. After all, the State itself had acknow­ledged the importance of design by estab­lishing utility furniture and so on. But what designers missed was that every British manufacturer was fed up with interfer­ence from Whitehall. If you set up a committee or a programme to do some­thing, it didn’t mean anything would necessarily come of it – Britain’s own tribal customs made sure of that’.

Russell says that the distaste private companies had for government-backed initiatives made his reign as director of the Council of Industrial Design feel like ‘twelve years hard labour’. He ridicules the interventionist industrial policies of Labour left-wingers, and contends that ‘there’s a lot to be said for stringing up some accountants and economists – they may run large businesses, yet often they know little of production’. He bemoans the oppression of small firms and longs for a proper relationship between mass production and hand­work (a copy of Schumacher’s Small is beautiful is prominent among his catholic collection of books). But he does believe that some centralised direction in design is necessary, so long as it is done well: ‘Governments always put just one toe in the water. Lloyd George offered homes fit for heroes for every soldier who returned from the First World War, but the most a private got was a roof over his head’.

Russell says that architects should have protested at the time, but that they were too busy with higher things. He thinks landscape architects take a broader view of how people relate to their environ­ment; and indeed landscape architecture is one of his great loves (he is an Honorary Associate of the Landscape Institute). The garden at his home is an astonishing labyrinth of carefully constructed arches, parapets, sculpted ponds and secret cor­ners, and forms a serene counterpoint to his acerbic remarks about contemporary affairs (clearly another of his great loves).

It is his talent in making furniture that Russell is best known for, and it is to the subject of furniture that he repeatedly returns. ‘Although I never worked from a bench, my close association with the real business of making and doing led me to think of design from that angle rather than from the drawing board. My father started me off in furniture repair, and I’ve always thought that there’s no better way to learn about furniture design than laying it all out on a bench, seeing every joint.

‘The seventeenth century was good for joinery; but what really inspired me was the drawer-work, flush surfaces and fine veneers of the eighteenth. My brother Dick was fascinated by Le Corbusier, Gropius and van der Rohe: through him, they influenced me a lot too. Recently someone brought us in a radio cabinet Dick had designed for Murphy’s in the early 1930s. It was one of the first models to be produced in quantity – ­something like 40,000 a year, I think – and it was very clear how much it reflected the ideas of both the eighteenth century and the Bauhaus’.

Russell believes that the Italian passion for ‘doing things different’ leads to good results only rarely. He feels that, by contrast, Habitat shows that furniture can be very simple in design, but still look quite seemly. He stresses that furniture desig­ners should gain experience in other fields, and should travel widely. And, he says, the things they design shouldn’t just make a profit (though that’s important): they should be there to be enjoyed too.

From a designer uncharacteristically political in his ways, such a humanistic point of view comes as reassuringly familiar – and very British.