“My belief is simply that if reasonable and intelligent people are offered something that is well made, well designed, of a decent quality and at a price they can afford, then they will like and buy it. This is the abiding principle to which I hold, whether as a designer, retailer or restaurateur.”
- Terence Conran
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In 1948 a student from one of England’s more
progressive public schools - Bryanston in Dorset -
enrolled at the Central School of Arts and Crafts.
His name was Terence Conran, he was just 17 and he
had already demonstrated alongside a keen eye for
design an extraordinary entrepreneurial drive. As a
boy he had traded a model boat he had made for a
metal-turning lathe, sold dolls’ house furniture to
his sister’s friends or pottery to his school masters.
And no sooner had he started a three-year course in
textile design than he was selling his own textile
prints.
In 1950, Conran quit his course to work for the
architect Dennis Lennon, whose practice was
commissioned to design the interior of a quarter-scale model of a
priceless flying boat for the 1951 Festival of Britain. “At the
start of the Fifties we still had rationing and there
was still a terrible austerity hanging over the
country. The Festival of Britain was a beacon of
hope, but it also started people thinking in a
different way -- not just about there needs, but
about their wants,” Terence observes.
