In November 2017 two poster-based exhibitions opened in London. The first, at London Transport Museum (LTM) in Covent Garden, championed the neglected role of women designers in the story of C20th British poster history. The second, at the Jewish Museum (JM) in Camden, examined the extraordinary influence of European émigré designers...

Dr. Bex Lewis. In 2001 Stuart Manley of Barter Books in Northumberland discovered a poster in the bottom of a box of auction books, liked it, and decided to frame it and display it in the shop. This poster was a bright pillar-box red, headed with a crown, and with...

One of the pleasures of researching poster history, and British poster history especially, is the sheer amount that has been written on the subject from the nineteenth century to the present day. Our bibliography is an ongoing attempt to list all the books written about poster design in the UK,...

I’ve written about Gregory Brown before (A Poster Pioneer), one of my favourite commercial artists who helped inspire a generation of designers and in the process did much to improve the overall quality of pre-war advertising in Britain. This blog looks at the process behind the creation of one of...

This blog post was originally published in 2016. John Burningham (1936-2019) lived in Hampstead, north London, and I was fortunate to interview him for London Transport Museum in 2010. On my several visits to his his lovely home next to the Heath, he was always a most generous and engaging...

Think of Blackpool and chances are you’ll think of the Tower. Or the piers. Or the Illuminations. Or the Pleasure Beach. Or the Golden Mile, Blackpool Rock, the Winter Gardens and a host of popular entertainments that have made the town Britain’s premier seaside resort. But it was not always...

In advertising, one agency’s homage can be another’s appropriation. Call it parody, plagiarism or pastiche, ‘repurposing’ a successful design for new ends has been with us since pictorial posters were first pasted onto the hoardings. In the process, the origin and meaning of a particular design can be lost as...

Posters have survived the decades in all sorts of strange ways. Some were acquired by collectors at the time and carefully preserved. Others have turned up in printers’ archives or long forgotten store rooms. Occasionally a ‘hoard’ is found in the most unlikely of places. And that’s exactly what happened...

2015 marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of Britain’s most important post-war graphic designers, Hans Unger (1915-75). A prolific poster artist (he produced 117 designs for London Transport alone), Unger was also an accomplished mosaicist and illustrator. In this blog, author and designer Naomi Games (daughter of...

Until recently the huge literature on British interwar commercial art has largely ignored the significant contribution made by women designers. Thankfully, the genius of Freda Lingstrom, Sybil Andrews, Anna & Doris Zinkeisen, Dora Batty, Herry Perry and many mores is finally getting the recognition it deserves, with new publications and...