Kenneth Grange, who has died aged 95, was Britain’s leading product designer in the second half of the 20th century. Even if his name is unknown, most people in Britain are familiar with his output: the Kenwood Chef food mixer, the Kodak Instamatic camera, the Ronson Rio hairdryer, the Morphy Richards iron . These ordinary things are part of our entire history. Grange was also responsible for the restyling of the InterCity 125 high-speed train and the 1997 TX1 version of the London taxi.
He was a tall, handsome, offensive man, imbued with that element of inner moral purpose often found in the designers of his post-war generation. He grew up determined to make the world a better place visually, always emphasizing functional efficiency. Grange was a master of reassessing use, but he also looked at design in terms of amenities. He wanted us to share in the surprising grace of the experience as the 125 train comes hurtling down the track.
When he set up his own design consultancy in 1956, Grange was one of a handful of designers working in the world of what was rarely called consumer goods. Many of his early commissions came through the Industrial Design Council (now the Design Council), a government body set up to improve national design standards. The Grange commission to design Britain’s first parking meter, the Venner, introduced in 1958, came through the council. So did his introduction to Kenneth Wood, the owner of the business in Woking whose domestic products were marketed as Kenwood. The clean-lined and easy-to-use Kenwood Chef food mixer became a status symbol of the housewives of its time.
Like his close contemporary Vidal Sassoon, Grange came from a non-artistic background and had a similarly innate sense of visual style. Both men were talents in the 1960s, Sassoon with his geometric hair, Grange with a succession of new-age, self-consciously fashionable urban modern products. He was a leading designer for the growing market in “portable accessories”: pens for Parker, cigarette lighters for Ronson, the Milward Courier melamine clipper and smoked perspex which, in 1963, won the Duke of Edinburgh’s prize for elegant design (now known as. Prince Philip Designers prize). Did Prince Philip himself use it? Grange insisted that he did.
In 1972 Grange joined four of the rising stars of their profession – Alan Fletcher, Colin Forbes, Theo Crosby and Mervyn Kurlansky – in founding the ultra-modern design group Pentagram. This was a multi-disciplinary consultancy which Grange described as a “one stop shop” providing specialist services in graphic design and advertising, architecture and – in the Grange area itself – product design.
The Pentagram was the generation of bees in terms of design consultancy: ambitious, professional, intelligent and insane. It attracted loyal clients, including Reuters, for whom Grange designed a Reuters monitor, a computer terminal and a state-of-the-art keyboard, superbly engineered from heavy silver aluminum sheet.
During the 70s Grange had the highest profile of his design commissions: the aerodynamics, interior layout and exterior shaping of the nose cone of the British Rail High Speed Train (HST). The InterCity 125 was a key element of BR’s strategy to attract passengers from cars and planes and back onto trains. However the first HST prototype they came up with was, in Grange’s opinion, “a lumpy, brutish thing”.
He realized that he could only improve the appearance by tackling the aerodynamics first. On his own initiative (and at his own expense) he spent a week at night working with a consulting engineer at Imperial College London, where there was a wind tunnel. During these experiments they developed some new ideas, getting rid of the buffers, hiding the couplings on the underside of the nose cone, and giving the train a more futuristic look.
It was launched in 1976 with its radical, dynamic nose design. Grange was always careful to credit the expertise of the engineers he worked with. As such, it was a major triumph and an enduring symbol of the best of 20th-century British design. The HST – still in use today on select passenger services after nearly 50 years – changed the public’s experience of train travel.
He was born in east London, the son of Hilda (née Long), a machinist, and Harry Grange, an East End policeman. Kenny was raised in what he vividly described as a “bacon-and-eggs house”, lavishly furnished with a three-piece suite and floral curtains, the dominant color being brown. However his parents supported his chosen career in what was then known as “commercial art”. During the second world war, the family moved to Wembley in north London, and Kenneth won a scholarship to the Willesden School of Arts and Crafts where, from the age of 14, he studied drawing and lettering.
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These basic skills allowed him to enter a succession of architects’ offices: Arcon; Bronek Katz and R Vaughan; Gordon and Ursula Bowyer; and, from 1952, the highly versatile architect and industrial designer Jack Howe – all these were modernists and leading figures in the post-war campaign to rebuild Britain using modern materials and techniques.
Grange took part in the 1951 Festival of Britain, working with Gordon and Ursula Bowyer on the Pavilion Sports exhibition for the South Bank. The festival would be a lasting inspiration to so many of the Grange’s generation of designers – including Sir Terence Conran and my husband, David Mellor. As Grange later recalled: “You couldn’t take a step without seeing something incredible – the cigar-shaped Skylon, the huge Discovery Dome, amazing metal sculptures, twisting and turning waterfalls. It was nothing like anything I had ever seen before.”
Where much of British design was still based on craftsmanship, led by ideas that went back to William Morris, Grange felt the fascination of machine production. He was excited by the sleek designs based on new technology that began to infiltrate Britain from the United States, describing the Eames molded plastic chair for example as “a rocket ship bursting into our narrow world”. I remember being impressed on my first visit to his house in Hampstead, north London, to find him possessing not just one Eames lounge chair but three.
Grange’s natural resilience stood him in good stead during the 70s and 80s, those years for designers when British manufacturing lost its way and, as he described it, “unfettered accounting succeeded the new dynamic in British industry. He delighted in dealing with foreign clients, particularly enjoying working in Japan where the native Japanese awareness of design delighted him. A particularly successful commission was a sewing machine designed for the Maruzen Sewing Machine Co in Osaka, to be marketed in Europe. On trips to Japan he began an impressive collection of beautiful wooden geisha combs.
The Pentagram itself flourished, moving in 1984 from Paddington to larger and more stylish premises in a converted dairy in Notting Hill. At this period he employed more than 80 designers and assistants in various disciplines, and the communal dining room became a welcome talking shop, a meeting point for the London design world of the time. I remember some great parties at Pentagram, including Grange’s 1984 wedding celebration with Apryl Swift.
For Grange himself the 1980s brought increased public recognition. In 1983 a solo exhibition of his work was held in the Boilerhouse at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
At this point he was already being hailed as Britain’s most successful product designer. He was made a CBE in 1984, and knighted in 2013. In 1985 he received an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art and in 1986 he became a master of the elite group of Royal Designers for Industry. Success never spoiled him. He had a streak of self-denigrating humor and kept a kind of boyish innocence, as if he could hardly believe his good luck.
The challenge of the job has always been his driving force. After he retired from Pentagram in 1997, after 25 years as a partner, he and Apryl took on a project of their own, converting an ancient stone barn in the remote countryside near Coryton in Devon into a stunning modern home with a staircase spiral of extremely ingenious modular construction. It took five years to complete; Grange commuted weekly between London and Devon, traveling on his famous High Speed Train.
In 2011 the Design Museum ran a retrospective, Kenneth Grange: Making Britain Modern. He continued to design in his 80s. Late commissions included the perfect men’s shirt for fashion designer Margaret Howell; an updated range of classic lights – the Type 3, Type 75 and, in its 90th year, the Type 80 – for Anglepoise, of which he became design director in 2003; and a wonderfully comfortable collection of chairs for the elderly. General levels of design for the elderly population angered him. “Where is the modern decent care home?” he would ask.
A staple of Grange comedy in the 60s was his design of a wooden bookcase in the shape of a man turned coffin, the ultimate exercise in recycling. “If I ever pop my bells, it’s books out and me in, with the cover set, up to the big client in the sky.”
Two earlier marriages ended in divorce. April lives on.
• Kenneth Henry Grange, designer, born 17 July 1929; he died 21 July 2024
• Fiona MacCarthy died in 2020