Sir Kenneth Grange

Kenneth Grange, who has died aged 95, was the leading British product designer of the second half of the 20th century. Even if unaware of his name, 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 everyday objects are part of all our histories. 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, ebullient man, a joker with that element of inner moral purpose often found in the designers of his postwar generation. He grew up imbued with a determination to make the world a better place visually, his emphasis always on functional efficiency. Grange was a master at reassessing usage, but he also viewed design in terms of sheer enjoyment. 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 just a handful of designers operating in the world of what were then quaintly called consumer goods. Many of his early commissions came via the Council of Industrial Design (now the Design Council), a governmental body set up with the remit of improving national design standards. Grange’s commission to design Britain’s first parking meter, the Venner, introduced in 1958, came via the council. So too did his introduction to Kenneth Wood, proprietor of the firm in Woking whose domestic products were marketed as Kenwood. Grange’s clean-lined and user-friendly Kenwood Chef food mixer became a housewives’ status symbol of its time.
Like his near contemporary Vidal Sassoon, Grange came from a non-artistic background and had a similarly innate sense of visual style. Both men were quintessentially 1960s talents, Sassoon with his geometric haircuts, Grange with a succession of urbane modern products for a new, self-consciously fashionable age. He became a prime designer for the growing market in “portable accessories”: pens for Parker, cigarette lighters for Ronson, the melamine and smoked perspex Milward Courier shaver which, in 1963, won the Duke of Edinburgh’s prize for elegant design (now known as the 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 his profession – Alan Fletcher, Colin Forbes, Theo Crosby and Mervyn Kurlansky – in founding the ultra-modern design group Pentagram. This was a multidisciplinary consultancy described by Grange as “a one-stop shop” providing specialist services in graphic design and advertising, architecture and – Grange’s own area – product design.
Pentagram became the bee’s knees of design consultancies: ambitious, professional, intelligent and jaunty. It attracted loyal clients, including Reuters, for whom Grange designed the Reuters monitor, a state-of-the-art computer terminal and keyboard, superbly well engineered in heavy silver aluminium sheet.
Through the 70s Grange was occupied with the most high profile of his design commissions: the aerodynamics, interior layout and exterior shaping of the nose cone of British Rail’s High Speed Train (HST). The InterCity 125 was a key element in BR’s strategy to woo passengers away from cars and planes and back on to the trains. However the first HST prototype they came up with was, in Grange’s opinion, “a lumpish, brutish thing”.
He realised he could only improve the appearance by first tackling the aerodynamics. On his own initiative (and at his own expense) he spent a week at night working with a consultant engineer at Imperial College London, where there was a wind tunnel. In the course of these experiments they developed a number of new ideas, getting rid of the buffers, hiding the couplings in the underside of the nose cone, and giving the train a more futuristic look.
It was launched in 1976 with its radical, dynamically angled nose design. Grange was always careful to give credit to the expertise of the engineers he worked with. All the same, it was his major triumph and a lasting symbol of the best of mid-20th-century British design. The HST – still in use today on selected passenger services after almost 50 years – transformed the public experience of travelling by train.
He was born in east London, the son of Hilda (nee Long), a machinist, and Harry Grange, an East End policeman. Kenneth was brought up in what he once vividly described as “a bacon-and-eggs kind of house”, respectably furnished with a three-piece suite and flowery curtains, the dominant colour being brown. Nevertheless his parents supported his chosen career in what was then termed “commercial art”. During the second world war, the family had moved to Wembley in north London, and Kenneth won a scholarship to Willesden School of Art and Crafts where, from the age of 14, he studied drawing and lettering.
These basic skills gave him the entree to a succession of architects’ offices: Arcon; Bronek Katz and R Vaughan; Gordon and Ursula Bowyer; and, from 1952, the remarkably versatile architect and industrial designer Jack Howe – all of these were modernists and prime movers in the postwar campaign to rebuild Britain using newly available materials and techniques.
Grange took part in the 1951 Festival of Britain, working alongside Gordon and Ursula Bowyer on the Sports Pavilion for the South Bank exhibition. For so many of Grange’s generation of designers – including Sir Terence Conran and my husband, David Mellor – the festival would be a lasting inspiration. As Grange later recollected: “You couldn’t walk a step without seeing something unlikely – the cigar-shaped Skylon, the huge Dome of Discovery, extraordinary metal sculptures, waterfalls that twisted and turned. Nothing was like anything I had ever seen before.”
Where much of British design was still craft-based, dominated 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 beginning to infiltrate Britain from the US, describing the moulded plastic Eames chair for example as “a rocket ship exploding into our narrow world”. I remember being impressed on my first visit to his house in Hampstead, north London, to find him the possessor of not just one Eames lounge chair but three.
Grange’s natural resilience stood him in good stead through the 70s and 80s, those lean years for designers when British manufacturing lost its way and, as he described it, “unbridled accountancy became the new dynamic in British industry”. He was glad of foreign clients, especially enjoying working in Japan where the innate Japanese awareness of design delighted him. An especially 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 started what became a considerable collection of beautiful wooden geisha combs.
Pentagram itself was flourishing, moving in 1984 from Paddington to larger and more stylish premises in a renovated dairy in Notting Hill. At this period it employed more than 80 designers and assistants in different disciplines, and the communal dining room became an ever-welcoming talking shop, a gathering point for London’s design world of the time. I remember some marvellous parties at Pentagram, including the celebration of Grange’s marriage in 1984 to Apryl Swift.
For Grange himself the 1980s brought increasing public recognition. In 1983 a solo exhibition of his work was held at the Boilerhouse at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
At this point he was already being lauded as Britain’s most successful product designer. He was made CBE in 1984, and knighted in 2013. In 1985 he received an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art and in 1986 became master of the elite group of Royal Designers for Industry. Success never spoilt him. He had a streak of self-denigrating humour and retained a kind of boyish innocence, as if he could hardly believe his good luck.
The sheer challenge of the job had always been his driving force. After his retirement from Pentagram in 1997, after 25 years as a partner, he and Apryl embarked on a project of their own, converting an ancient stone-built barn in the remote countryside near Coryton in Devon into a spectacular modern home with a spiral staircase of highly ingenious modular construction. Completion took five years; Grange commuted weekly between London and Devon, travelling on his familiar High Speed Train.
In 2011 the Design Museum held a retrospective, Kenneth Grange: Making Britain Modern. He continued to design into his 80s. Late commissions included the perfect men’s shirt for the fashion designer Margaret Howell; an updated range of classic lights – the Type 3, Type 75 and, in his 90th year, the Type 80 – for Anglepoise, for whom he had been made design director in 2003; and a really comfortable collection of chairs for elderly people. General levels of design for the aged population made him angry. “Where is the decent modernist care home?” he would ask.
Typical of Grange’s zany 60s humour was his design of a man-shaped timber bookcase that converted to a coffin, the ultimate exercise in recycling. “If I ever pop my clogs, it’s books out and me in, with the lid fixed, up to the great client in the sky.”
Two earlier marriages ended in divorce. Apryl survives him.
Kenneth Henry Grange, designer, born 17 July 1929; died 21 July 2024