British Design

MoMA Design Series

The story of British design told through works selected from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Great Britian was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and the epicenter of the development of modern industrial design.This book the fourth volume in the MoMA Design Series featuring works in the Museum’s collection—explores this legacy, tracing the growth of British design from the eighteenth century to the Millennium Dome and beyond. In its more than two-hundred-year scope, British Design explores the Arts and Crafts Movement, the Spitfire and Hurricane fighter planes of World War II, the Mini car and Dyson vacuum cleaner, the “Cool Britannia” cultural explosion in the late 1990s, and British designers’ take on the digital devices that define entertainment and communication in the early twenty-first century.

An introduction by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, provides an overview of design culture in Great Britain; an essay and timeline by Hugh Aldersey-Williams, curator, former design critic for The New Statesman, and author of World Design and New American Design, illuminates the masterpieces of modern British design superbly reproduced in the volume’s plate section.



Hugh Aldersey-Williams, design critic and curator, explores science, design, architecture, national identity and other themes in his work. He served as the design critic for The New Statesman for five years and is the author of The Most Beautiful Molecule and World Design.


Paola Antonelli is Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.