British design has had much to celebrate over the last 75 years. During these eight decades, not only have British designers emerged as key drivers of the economy, but they have also created a visual identity for the UK that is recognised and admired across the globe. A recent Royal Mail special stamp issue celebrated the achievement of 20th century British design, including two design icons who share the British Council’s 1934 birthday: R.J. Mitchell’s Spitfire plane with its distinctive elliptical wings, and Harry Beck’s radical map for navigating the world’s first underground transport system. Other choices highlighted the impressive diversity of British creativity in this period, ranging from Mary Quant mini skirts, Robin Day plastic chairs, Penguin paperbacks to the famous Routemaster London buses.

At the start and the end of the 20th century, if you wanted to see innovative and future-facing design you looked to the UK: to the designers and architects of our great trading cities of Glasgow and London. It would have been much more difficult to make that widespread claim for British design in the 1930s. 75 years ago visitors to our regional and capital cities would have had few opportunities to see or experience modern design. There were, however, some remarkable exceptions whose legacy continues to this day. Headed by Frank Pick, the newly created London Transport’s (now TFL) programme for integrated design has arguably never been bettered since the 1930s. Their commissioned poster series set the benchmark for public art programmes and the decade’s most enduring image remains Harry Beck’s Underground diagram, the most influential Metro system map in the world. Beck’s legacy can still be seen in the New York, Sydney and even the Moscow subway, for which Frank Pick received an award from Stalin’s Soviet Government. London Transport continued to lead British design, notably with the distinctive Routemaster bus developed by the innovative team of A. A. Durant, Colin Curtis and Douglas Scott, only recently retired from London bus routes after 60 years’ service.

1934 was to prove a defining year; it also saw the creation by publisher Allen Lane of another classic: Penguin paperback books. Originally colour coded into genres, a decade later this British publishing project to make books accessible to the widest audience became a design icon under the artistic direction of Swiss typographer Jan Tschichold. London, always an international city, had by the 1930s become a stopping point for émigré designers fleeing Europe. These designers, like others before them, revitalised British design and left an enduring legacy. In 1934, the most famous arrival was former Bauhaus master and architect Walter Gropius, followed a year later in 1935 by Marcel Breuer, both living briefly in one of London’s rare modernist buildings: Lawn Road, Hampstead, designed by pioneering architect Wells Coates. Many more design talents followed, some with Jewish backgrounds, like the design writer and theorist Nikolaus Pevsner or the prolific textile designer Jacqueline Groag, who trained at the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule under the legendary Josef Hoffman. The list is long and distinguished, from Hans Schleger, who went on to create corporate identities for many blue chip British companies such as the John Lewis department store; Egon Riss, whose Penguin Donkey bookcase for the British manufacturer Isokon lives on as a much loved design classic in stylish domestic and commercial settings; to UK architects Eva Jiricna and the recently deceased Jan Kaplicky of Future Systems, who left Prague in the late 1960s following the Soviet invasion.

In 1945, at the end of the Second World War, the creative input from émigré designers, along with a newly confident British profession, quickly brought design into the public eye. Key here is the work of Design Research Unit founder Misha Black, whose vision for integrated design, design campaigning and education remains influential to this day. A defining moment came with the 1946 exhibition Britain Can Make It (BCMI), which reopened the Victoria & Albert museum after its wartime closure. BCMI set out the new social and modern agenda for design famously explored a decade later in the 1951 Festival of Britain. Released after the long years of wartime austerity, British designers produced some of the most enduring images of the mid-20th century including Alec Issigonis’ Mini car of 1957, Robin Day’s Polypropylene Chair of 1963 and Peter Blake’s cover design for The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s album, 1967.

During the same period, Britain also helped to build another contribution to international design: the unrivalled tradition of our British art and design school education. The UK continues to enjoy one of the best creative education systems in the world, including the flagship Royal College of Art in London. It was art colleges across the country, in Birmingham, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Kingston and Manchester that kick-started this postwar British creative and cultural revolution, famously including John Lennon (Liverpool Art College), Mary Quant (Goldsmiths University of London), David Bowie (Bromley Art School), Alan Fletcher (Central School of Art) and Bryan Ferry (Newcastle University).

The focus British art schools placed on freedom of expression also did much to shape the way the next generation of designers defined themselves in the late 1970s and 80s. By the early 1980s the energy of British Street style had changed the visual landscape of design through the work of Vivienne Westwood for fashion, Ron Arad (Architectural Association) in furniture, Peter Saville (Manchester Polytechnic) for graphics and James Dyson (Royal College of Art) in product design.

A decade later, British success across creative disciplines including architecture, art, fashion and communication design was widely acknowledged. Building on the reputation Vivienne Westwood had established for British fashion, Paris fashion houses, for generations French only, invited Brits John Galliano, Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney to revitalise their powerful global brands. In product design, Jasper Morrison’s minimal aesthetic established him as one of the few British designers to achieve a worldwide profile. Also important at this time was the strong contribution Britain made to foster design criticism and experimentation. In this context, British publications led the field, starting with Design magazine in the 1960s, then i.D magazine (1980), Blueprint (1983), Wallpaper (1996), TANK (1998), and recently, Icon (2003).

In 2009 the profile and the reputation of British design is strong and London’s position as a global centre for creativity and innovation remains unrivalled. It was London’s ‘beautiful chaos’ that persuaded visionary Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo to open her new Dover Street Market retail/exhibition space, in which selling and installation space are never clearly defined. This blurring of creative disciplines and a new emphasis on conceptual design is a theme identified across the practice of several contemporary British designers, including Dunne&Raby, Gitta Gschwendtner, Martino Gamper and the recently formed OKAYstudio, a collective of product design graduates from the Royal College of Art. London continues to grow experimental companies such as Established & Sons, who promote British creativity as patrons, collectors, manufacturers and retailers of design and redefine pioneering work on the margins of different disciplines, notably the meet point of art, craft and design. That meet point – not only between cultures or areas of creative practice but also between different disciplines, notably science and technology – continues to inspire new directions in British design. In the 21st century what remains unique, compelling and innovative about British design is the continual reworking of such creative and cultural diversity.