The Origins of Brit Cool and the Creative Community We Need Now

The Story of How Creative Entrepreneurship Was Coined in the Late 90s and Brought About the Explosion of Brick Lane and Hackney as Hotbeds of Creative Energy That Changed The World

 

First of all, quick update: I’m changing careers to become a therapist. That means I’m a student again. I’m getting my Masters in Mental Health Counseling at Northwestern right now. I’ll graduate in August of 2027. It’s all very very VERY exciting but it also means I’m slower at writing non-academic papers and producing my podcast. Please stick with me. I am slowly looking for a podcast platform to take me on so if you have connections at Dear Media or any of the big platforms who might want to fill the gap in talking from a Gen X perspective about creativity and mental wellness in different phases of our ever expanding lives, please hook a girl up. I have no revenue and no advertising budget to promote Actual People and I’m currently making no income as a single mom. I do this for the love of it and it might not be sustainable forever without that network effect. That said, you can buy me a cup of coffee here or hell, buy me a La Marzocco. I ain’t going to say no.

Now onto the article attached to Episode 16, (Episode 17 with Lindsay Kaplan of Chief is out now too), which is a whole lesson in design’s rebel origins. This is a true gift. Enjoy the first part in written form…

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I knew that Piers Roberts started something remarkable in the UK called DesignersBlock because in 2010, I had the good fortune to be a part of it. That year, days before I got married I was in London curating a group show of handpicked female designers and artists called What Women Make. This was kind of like the pinnacle of that period of my life where I produced this group show as part of a larger show called Designer's Block and I was surrounded by just immense talent throughout this venue and throughout the city of London. it took place in a disused building south of the Thames. It was filled with industrial designers, furniture designers, lighting designers, inventors, artists, all of the highest order as was the entire show across the city called the London Design Festival.

So DesignersBlock was the desperate attempt to salvage the investment I made into the most exciting shop that ever opened and created the spark for East London and super cool spaces and things like that.

And I can assure you, nothing in the US is as great and unlike Milan's Salone Del Mobile, which is this very impressive global center of design - everybody goes to Salone del Mobile to shop, and it's absolutely amazing - but the London Design Festival is very different than the Salon Del Mobil which feels more like a trade show in its centrality and immensity but this feels more like a celebration of talent, and it really brings the city to life. It's not like a craft fair or a trade show of just commercially viable things like you'd find at the Jacob Javits Center in New York or the Atlanta Gift Show. This is about the highest aesthetics, visionaries, and the entire city as a backdrop supporting this goal. The UK has such a strong, beautiful history of maker culture from William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement to Terence Conran and his playful conceptual design aesthetic. In this interview you'll get to tie together a bunch of luminary names of designers from London and all over Europe that Piers Roberts has touched in some way . What I didn't know about Piers, DesignersBlock and all of British design, is just how it fit into a larger narrative of a fight for creative freedom and individuality including things we consider commonplace today and things that are disappearing fast as independent design and independent retail disappear.

Piers:

I didn’t know anything about design at school. Creativity was being good at drawing and it was also seen as very much ‘less than’ the hard subjects of maths and physics and chemistry and things like that within the schooling I went to, which was the English public school system.

It was all about ‘you are creating the leaders for the future.’ The public schools were set up in order to create business leaders and people that would oversee the empire, and the student body was drawn from 5% of the population who were from the social class at the top - so all of these ideas around patriarchy, male leadership, white power, all of these things were part of the system that was about educating 5% of the British population to rule the world.

Chauncey:

Yep. Okay. That tracks.

Piers:

If you take boys into an all boy environment, then what do they know about women? If you take boys into an environment that's very hierarchical especially for boys aged 13 to 18 based in bullying, which was absolutely (the standard) all the way through, then you create the foundation for the officers in the army who won't mind sending their men into battles where they'll die.

Chauncey jokingly:

I saw The Wall by Pink Floyd.

Piers:

There you go so you know how fucked up it all is. Nice to hear you say it because I mean The Wall was incredibly viscerally and different to anything else. It immediately triggers for me that boarding school was all about brutalism and trauma. The woman who invented the term neurodiversity, Judy Singer, she has a little catch phrase. She says, the schoolyard bully could identify autism for generations.

Did you know I was diagnosed autistic?

Chauncey:

No.

Piers:

Yes, you see this is one of the things that really helped to make things make sense. Part of getting out of the DesignersBlock world and all of that was the realization that mentally I was completely screwed up. And you know, the stage at which I had the breakdown is not entirely clear, but the sort of persevering and the self-harming behaviors and the confusions and the not being able to generate work and the sort of realizing the little triggers that have people go he is a bit odd. Maybe it's easier to leave him alone even when you created the bloody world that created their space in order to exist. This is what's incredibly nuts about the work we did at DesignersBlock was how prescient it was and how much it led the way, and how things that simply didn't exist and now exist in a way that of course we all do that.

Chauncey:

Like what?

Piers:

The term creative entrepreneur didn't exist until then. We had designer-makers. But the social factors that led to what I was doing were…

Chauncey:

What were you doing? because now I'm recording for a podcast. Give us a background on what DesignersBlock was?

Piers:

So DesignersBlock was the desperate attempt to salvage the investment I made into the most exciting shop that ever opened in the old Truman Brewery and created the spark for East London and super cool spaces and things like that.

I invested what was the equivalent of a 120 square meter apartment in EC1, worth a few million, into opening a shop that would bring together all the work of the designers emerging in the late nineties from the UK, the Netherlands in particular, and Scandinavia and what I saw was coming from a social science background of a generation looking to do something hopeful, optimistic, and a little bit in the punk ethic in a way which created this new design thing.

The factors that drove that were the economic recession in the nineties due to moving manufacturing out of Europe to China. The reward that you got from designing stuff for a manufacturer or brand wasn't all that great. Without investment, without manufacturers, without a good reward model, if you've got the same number of graduates coming out of design schools as exist across the entire UK industry, what do you do? You do things for yourself, you invest in yourself. This is where the idea that the creative becomes the driver of their own business begins.

You had the fashion world. They were disgruntled and not getting work. There wasn't enough work. They didn't have enough choice. And contemporary design had become quite boring in some ways, and you could probably say the same now. 85% of contemporary design coming out of Italy at that time was sold in Germany so in April you had the Salone del Mobile where you presented the ideas. In January you sold them at the International Furniture Fair of Cologne. The season for contemporary design was Milan for ideas in April and January in Cologne for sale.

You had family-based manufacturing in Italy backed by Milan and Milan was also the center of publishing so they created the magazines to tell the story, and that's why it was so crucial and that was the fundamental difference between Milan, and say, Torino. You’ve also got family based retail and distribution in Germany so the whole thing was based around a business model of family to family. Then later other countries said, hmm, we quite like the idea of being contemporary design and you've got the beginnings of what becomes creative exports as soft power. People think of Britain as super cool, or they did until Brexit when it suddenly nose dived but up till that time, it's because we had the music, the fashion, the art. Contemporary UK design didn’t exist yet except for a tiny, tiny, tiny margin. You had your Ron Arads Tom Dixons, Jasper Morrisons, these famous designers employed by manufacturers and brands abroad.

Chauncey:

What year?

Piers:

The mid-nineties

Chauncey:

And what do you think caused the shift ?  

Piers:

Me, me, it's me (laughs). No, slightly exaggerating, but I definitely had a part of it.

Chauncey:

So what changed?

Piers:

IKEA came about during that time and suddenly you had cheap contemporary design coming from Ikea that came along with this campaign that said,"Chuck out your Chintz.” Up until that time chintz - old velvet fabrics, dark sofas, heavy stuff, carpets - this was what the home was about. When you’re talking about the  British elite it was antiques. It was shooting grouse. This was leather patches on elbows. 

Chauncey:

I can't help but connect this heavy design to boarding school, bullying, the patriarchal thread, the coat of arms…

Piers:

You're absolutely going to the right place. You are talking about the shift in the British story. Pirate Radio came about in the sixties. There was radio Caroline that was based on a ship two to three miles off the coast of Britain, the end of the British territorial waters. They used these old structures built in the Second World War (built to fight the nazis) to create radio stations.

This was the first time the kids were going, ‘we're bored of the BBC.’ The BBC is the voice of Britain… Britain (was) controlling the narrative, the upper classes (were controlling the narrative).

You're looking at the beginnings of claiming independence (from the) control systems (of) Britain (and the message Britain pout out that isn’t this a) wonderful place of freedom.

Britain is emerging out of the war, having to rebuild… Actually the war has affected everybody's life. We should be looking at social democracy as a way forward, where we look at health and wellbeing and housing and all of those sorts of things, but it's still fundamentally a conservative country with a small “c” and a Big “C”, small “c” old ways of thinking, big “C”, politically dominated by the Tory party forever.

The pirate radio was the first attempt to say, ‘Sod you! We want to tell our own story. We want to play records that are coming out in America, which aren't getting airtime on the BBC’, and they had to exist outside the territorial waters of the UK in order not to get locked down

Chauncey:

I grew up on the movie Tommy from The Who and the Wall. My mother had an English boyfriend for 20 years and his father was a World War II test pilot, and I heard a lot of these stories about boarding school from him, about life then. I have a general sense of this and later on, the Manchester sound.

Piers:

Yeah. That came after Margaret Thatcher. All the way through there are these pockets of resistance. This attempt to do your own thing. You've got the punk era…

Chauncey:

You've got Vivienne Westwood …

Piers:

Exactly Then you get the fashion industry in the nineties and this is when the young British artists were coming about. We arrived at this idea of “Brit Cool” and then in 1998 the term creative industries was coined. That's the year that I got started. At the time, there were around three contemporary design stores in the UK.

Chauncey:

Tell me a little bit more about the how the term creative industries was coined?

Piers:

There was a labor MP called Chris Smith who is probably the only MP who really wanted the job of DCMS, which is Department of Culture, Media and Sport, and in the years running up to the election of Tony Blair in 1997, there was an attempt to say, look, there are all these industries that in and of themselves are quite small, but if you add them together becomes something quite sizable. This includes advertising, design, architecture, film, fashion, all of these sorts of areas. …Craft heritage, you can trace that back to the 1850s and liberal attempts of progression. And so the whole Pre-Raphaelite movement…

Chauncey:

There's a legacy in the UK of design and creativity.

Piers:

Yeah which really you see now in terms of craft brewing, high quality butchers, creatives running their own business, but (at this time) this is (about) creative people deciding to invest in themselves. This is creative people saying, nobody's going to invest in me. They don't understand my ideas.

They're not willing to give me a good deal. I better do it for myself. But the emergence of the creative as the driver of business comes with the work that I guess I'm doing in that period. Because when you're looking at fashion and art, art has always had the distribution model or where it's dominated by galleries, and fashion is about magazines and high-end couture and models and sexy photograph but the idea that a designer coming up with an object that isn't as boring as the shit we're being offered, isn't as dry as the contemporary design that's coming in lots of places and is more quirky and interesting, that is being led by the Dutch and then it's in the UK.  

You've got Tom Dixon, who was absolutely a pioneer. You had Ron Arad and Jasper Morrison being employed by the bigger  brands and doing their different things but the Dutch were definitely leading the way and there were interesting things going on in Scandinavia. So we were picking up on stuff happening in Sweden and Finland. Norway was still behind. Norway would start to invest in contemporary design around 2000 or 2001. Until that time, Norway had always basically been an agricultural economy that hit wealth when it hit oil in the North Sea but the idea that you are looking at contemporary design as a way of signifying cultural values within the nation is very much there.

There was a woman called Penny Sparke who was at the RCA. She wrote a book  about how you photograph design and how that represents different philosophical approaches.

From the ceiling, you would hang a bit of Italian design that would suggest it's sort of philosophical foundations and how it was all about expressing an aesthetic idea. With German design, which was about function you would photograph it from the front. It would show how it works. Here are all the knobs and buttons whereas in Scandinavia, you would photograph it within the home, which was about suggesting that contemporary design was about the quality of life within the family and in the home.

Britain didn't really have very much because we didn't buy any. The only contemporary design that was being sold at that time in the UK would be in a business that wanted its front office to look like it was progressive and its boardroom to look like it was doing something interesting, but nobody had it in design in their home.

There were no showrooms for contemporary design on the ground floor because there was no ground floor audience. There were (only) three or four contemporary design stores. If you had money, you bought antiques.

Chauncey:

What were those big design stores then?

Piers:

We're talking about the late nineties. Conran was the main one. His influence has been phenomenal across the whole of British design. He created Habitat, aspinoff, cheaper than Conran's.  You've got Heal's at the top of Totten Court Road… Purves and Purves…SCP, which is Sheridan Coakley products, the first person to produce design by Jasper Morrison, Konstantin Grcic,  Matthew Hilton. These sorts of characters, the characters that become the sort of main players in the top 20 designers every brand used because it's easy for the marketing people to sell.

Chauncey:

Yeah.

Piers:

That was about it. You then look at East London and East London was, well, you've got the City of London, the richest square mile in the country, if not in the world, apart from Wall Street, and next door to it, the two boroughs of Tower Hamlets where the Truman Brewery is and Hackney, which becomes this super cool place.  They had, for a hundred years, been the poorest boroughs in the country - so you have this sort of next doorness of incredible wealth and incredible poverty. Brick Lane had been the stepping off point for immigrants for 4, 500 years. There's a building in Brick Lane that had been two types of Christian Church, a synagogue, and a mosque. It’s the only building to have served all three and it’s still there. It’s Jewish owned and Bengali occupied now. It’s also where the famous Cable Street riots occurred in 1936 when Oswald Mosley, who was attempting to be the Hitler of the UK, took a great big marching rally up through Brick Lane where there were all these Jewish immigrants and all the Jewish immigrants took their pots from under their beds and threw them over the heads of everybody and the marching rally dispersed. It is still celebrated as this sort of wonderful rejection of fascism from within an immigrant  community.

Chauncey:

We need that here. We need that here now.

Piers:

Yeah, you do.

Chauncey:

I want to take it back to the late nineties and the coining of the term creative industries and how DesignersBlock started along with that and how that ties into the way the creative industry has gone a little bit awry as of late. How do you think we can get back on track? What role does AI play ?

Piers:

To me, it was coincidental that I opened my shop at the same time that the term creative industries was coined, but maybe it's not. There was certainly social factors driving changes that I picked up on sooner than anybody and did something about, and when I look back on it now, being autistic, I recognize that it was an autistic trait to see things before others.

I imagined everybody else could see this. I'd worked through what I might like to do in all sorts of layers and detail, which is kind of what is sometimes criticized as obsessional thinking, but if I hadn't done that, would I have come up with this idea?

Would I have worked out to place my store in an area that would become the perfect place to strike the match that lit this whole East London becoming the coolest place on the planet, all about youth and ideas, and exciting stuff and having a go and making use of empty spaces? To an extent, I understood that, and I had all sorts of layers in my thinking that drove it.

To a certain extent, I was incredibly blind to other things. I really didn't know how to run a shop. I didn't really know what I was doing. It wasn't like I'd been working in the sector for ages. I'd got involved with a big show from a museum in Cologne that opened in January 1996 called Highlights Design from Great Britain at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Cologne during the Cologne furniture Fair. That’s what led me to meet this new generation of designers. There was Inflate. There was Jan van der Lande. There was Tom Dixon. There was Simon Pengelly. There was Ron Arrow, Jasper Morrison, all of these sorts of characters, Ross Lovegrove, all of these sorts of people and they're all in one place.

And the world was very small, so you could run a party, which I would do in due course with a hundred people, and you would have everybody in the sector in one place. It was tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny but that also meant it was very condensed. There were very few publications that were out there. The Guardian did a little guide on a Friday. Elle Decorations sort of existed. Blueprint was the main magazine. They were the ones with I partnered with in order to get people to come to my shows.

I had people like Talvin Singh DJing for me and we'd wander up and down Brick Lane and there were all these extraordinary characters that were there in this tiny little space because the world of contemporary London cool all existed within this really condensed little space.

And I just thought, isn't that amazing? and I thought, well, I'm never going to be a designer because that's not how I work. Maybe I could do something to promote this. And I thought, isn't it obvious? Surely if I open this shop, everybody's going to go, wow, isn't that amazing? Then they will come and buy all my furniture and we’ll all make lots of money and it will be great.

And so I sort of expanded, expanded, expanded it until it became this 250 square meter two and a half thousand square foot shop and exhibition space that blew the world away. It absolutely totally caught fire in terms of people's imagination. Wayne Hemingway who started Red or Dead, was doing a breakfast thing with Chris Evans who did the big breakfast and every week he'd come to my shop to get things out to display within his. Every week we would be having our work picked up by the magazines.

Graham Norton, who's ridiculously famous now, bought his very first contemporary design from my shop…

The first bit Marc Newson ever did that was like spun plastic (and he went on to) be number two at Apple under Jony Ive. He was doing his very first design products in the U.K. in my shop. He was based out of Australia and being picked up in Japan.

I ran this party and everybody came along and I had no idea what I was doing. I mean, here am I, I never go to parties because I don't know what to do and I don't know what goes on and I became the world's greatest design festival, architecture festival, party organizer number one.

Chauncey:

You were just going on pure instinct, right?

Piers:

It is pure instinct. ..The autistic qualities you normally get disparaged for were crucial for me to be able to do what I did at that time and through those periods. I originated the idea of using big empty buildings for shows. There was no property developer that had ever used a building for public shows. There'd been the occasional fashion show.

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