Sir Kenneth Grange

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 1 January 2017

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sir Kenneth Grange is a designer. He's been designing elements of our everyday lives for the past six decades. Born in London in 1929, he went to Willesden art school aged fourteen and four years later he left and embarked on a remarkable career. He is still working today at 87 years old. "Why would I stop? I mean, if a bloke can play the piano, you don't stop him playing it, do you?" His long career stretches from the early days of modernism to the digital age. One of his first big jobs was working for the Festival of Britain in 1951. He was co-founder of the design studio Pentagram, led a life with strong echoes of TV's "Mad Men" for a while, and his work has infused the texture of the UK. His designs include the first parking meter, the Intercity 125 train, the Kenwood mixer, the Morphy Richards iron, the Wilkinson triple razor, bus shelters, the black cab, the Parker 25 pen and the Anglepoise lamp. He's also the reason we no longer get wet when we fill our cars with petrol: he designed petrol station forecourts with roofs. In 2013 he was knighted for his services to design, and in 2016 an Intercity 125 was named Sir Kenneth Grange. Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is the BBC.
0:03.2	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young.
0:04.9	Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4.
0:09.6	For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the Radio broadcast.
0:14.0	For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk-radio4.
0:30.5	My castaway this week is the designer Sir Kenneth Grange.
0:42.1	He has been at it since the 50s, improving our lives with ingenious solutions to making living better.
0:49.6	Such as the breadth of his work in theory, you could have started a day by using one of his
0:54.6	razors to shave, press your shirt with a steam iron he conceived,
0:58.4	travelled on a high-speed train he dreamt up before getting to work beneath one of his
1:02.3	angle-poise lamps using a pen he created. Part of that post-war boom in British creativity,
1:08.5	his career in design began before the word itself was even commonly used,
1:13.6	and the modernism he embraced was a distinct departure from the cream and brown tassled interior
1:19.6	of his childhood. He says, I like finding solutions to things. The best jobs are where you run
1:26.5	up against one problem after another. I'm never daunted. Sooner or later, I know I'm going to resolve
1:33.4	how to make the bloody thing. So welcome Sir Kenneth Grange, irons, razors, bus shelters,
1:39.4	cameras, fountain pens, trains. You have been designing throughout the last six decades.
1:45.9	What do you think has been to date your most enduring creation?
1:51.6	I think without a doubt it's the train. It's given me the greatest pleasure and it'll see me out.
1:59.0	The train being the intercity one to five? The intercity one to five, yes, if I call it the train.
2:02.8	Knowing it's the only train that matters. Well it's the only train we really think of,
2:06.1	actually, when we think of a train. It celebrated its 40th anniversary just last year, 2016.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.