Design ’46

This is the book that accompanied the exhibition 'Britain Can Make It', which was held in 1946 at the Victoria and Albert Museum and organized by the Council of Industrial Design. The theme was design as part of everyday life and included Edward Bawden's wallpaper in a room setting called 'middle-class living room.' The exhibition was intended to be a patriotic celebration of the best of British design, a year after the end of the Second World War. It was extremely popular and in just over a month it had 1,432,546 visitors. Yet the exhibition was notorious for the frustrations it provoked in a public who were still living under the Utility scheme. They were presented with a vast array of new consumables they could not actually buy.