davidthedesigner

i've never worked on the ground floor (#9)

So here we are at the end of this little series, at least for the time being, for now I'm back at number 7 (though not under the Velux windows - at least at the moment). But this might not be the last move, so the series may reappear one day in the distant future. And who knows, that might even be to a studio on the ground floor.

But in the meantime we had a little two-year sojourn in what really does look like a real designer's studio - complete with obligatory mountain bike (for this time I can show you the interior as well).

And, yes, of course the building had once been a Victorian warehouse. But this one was a paper store, for the building was part of what was once an enormous (hot metal) print works. Surely a sign that everything changes in time.

Which I suppose is the only conclusion that I can draw from a career spread over nine locations: that everything changes, given time. And that there's never any going back - either to relive good times, or to rectify mistakes. A lesson perhaps, if one were needed, that it's always best to look upon the bright side of life.

i've never worked on the ground floor (#8)

So here's where we ended up after working from home for a number of years: the basement of St Thomas House. The second basement of my career. We stayed here for five years. Five years of extremes, I seem to recall. All the ups and downs of running a business. And employing people: that's no easy task. And it was another property boom that eventually forced us out. Like history repeating itself.

i've never worked on the ground floor (#7)

I haven't been very good at keeping up with this series, have I? That's assuming that you can even remember it - because I see that it's getting on for the best part of a year since I told you about the Litchfield Street days. I have very fond memories of that place. But sooner or later, all things must pass. And so I moved myself and my studio to home, to work solo again for a while:

Yes, it's one of those. But I'd prefer not to tell you exactly which one, if you don't mind? And the move coincided with some tumultuous times: there was the boom and bust of the late Thatcher era and some very difficult family circumstances. But I set myself up in a studio in the attic space - it's under two of those Velux windows that you can see here:

And there was one thing that made this arrangement possible: the fax machine (remember those?). Because it meant that all of a sudden I had a means of showing things to a client without having to be on their doorstep every working hour of the week. And after two years of this I bought myself a computer: and, no, not a Mac, but an Apricot XEN. With a massive 30MB (yes, that's megabyte) hard disk. Which cost me the best part of £7,000. No other designer I knew had a computer at the time. In fact, if I mentioned it to any of my fellow travellers, their reaction was always "I'm never having one of those - I don't want to be a secretary". But it meant that I could format all of the typesetting that I ever needed and get it delivered back to me the next day (via a bureau in Aberdeen, of all places). It all sounds very primitive now, but back then it was the future. And it put me in a position of being able to take on an assistant.

And then the business grew. And we switched to Macs: a Quadra 650 if I recall correctly. Shared between three of us (basically because the thing cost £17,000 together with an A4 laser printer and copies of Quark XPress 3, Photoshop and Illustrator). But we couldn't manage like that for long. So more Macs were bought. And we grew. And more staff joined. And we had to take over one of the bedrooms just to fit us all in (I think we got up to six in number). But eventually, the strains of running a business inside a family home bacome too much for everyone to bear. Which led us next to a basement (but I'll tell you about that another time).

But I (without the staff) did eventually return. And I'm writing this now from underneath one of those Velux windows. Look closely and you might just see me waving to you.

i've never worked on the ground floor (#6)

It's a coincidence that I launched this little series on the same day that Google launched Street View in the UK. I realised, of course, that I could probably illustrate all of the buildings I've ever worked in by courtesy of the Google cameras. But somehow, I felt I might be missing out in some way - how, I'm not really sure. I did go back to Pond Street for the first time since leaving the employ of Henrion. But there was nothing there, apart from the building: that was exactly the same as I remember it, but everything around it had changed. And there were no longer designers in residence: these days it's the Hampstead Clinic of Chinese Medicine. So maybe that act of paying homage doesn't matter after all.

I had, though, wanted to go back to the next one (hence the delay since the last post in this series), but a little bird told me that it's covered in scaffolding (and those protective nets) at the moment. And there's not much point in photographing just that. So here comes Street View to the rescue:

And here we are on the fringes of Covent Garden with The Ivy at the end of the street. Sadly, I never got to eat there (though, to compensate, more than a few Kir Royales were downed in le Beaujolais next door). The second and third floors were my territory (though not both at the same time, obviously). And with some illustrious company to keep the creative juices flowing. In fact, creativity seemed to seep from its very fabric. It had, at one time, been the studio of Alan Aldridge (we knew that because we found a solicitor's letter under the carpet chasing an unpaid debt).

It was here that I met and worked with Bob and Horace, employed Lashko as my right-hand man, and rubbed desks with the architects Jon Broome and Simon Conder, along with many other kindrid spirits. (Forgive me if you're reading this and I've left you out of the list; do put that right by leaving a comment - or emailing me if you're shy.)

Ah, happy days. But we were eventually forced out by a boom in property prices (remember those?).

i've never worked on the ground floor (#5)

After 18 months of working for Henrion, I gave up on designing. And, yes, it was a direct consequence, but I'm not going to go into that just here. Suffice it to say that when you look back on a career, it's surprising how quite momentous changes turn on what might appear to be chance circumstances. Which, in a way, is how I became an archaeological illustrator.

I did that for four years - and became rather expert at drawing Samian pottery, apparently. But after four years I'd done all that I could do. 

I'd drawn this Anglo-Saxon cast bronze strap end, which is perhaps my most accomplished illustration, and there was nowhere else to go.

And then one day a friend who worked for the English Tourist Board knocked on the door and asked for advice on preparing some artwork for a map. "I could do that" I said. And that knock on the door set me on a course of self-employment and a gradual return to designing.

And to the second floor of this building and a little studio above a barber's shop.

I didn't know it then, but I was to go on to design for the English Tourist Board (which became the English Tourism Council and then Enjoy England) for the next 25 years.

i've never worked on the ground floor (#4)

My escape from the East End came via the Royal Society of Arts. I entered and won the typography section of their design bursaries scheme (at that time you were eligible to enter for up to a year after leaving college). FHK Henrion was the chairman of the judging panel and got in touch and offered me a job. And so I swapped 'the drain' and the number 15 bus for the Northern Line and Belsize Park station. Then a quick jog up Haverstock Hill before cutting through Hampstead Green:

Which took me to the first floor of 35 Pond Street:

And I've told you lots about those times already: here (sorry, that's one of those early posts where TypePad managed to lose the pictures), here and here.

i've never worked on the ground floor (#3)

It's a strange thing, this looking back. I'm beginning to wonder how my career might have panned out if I'd stayed at those early places longer than I did. But the IBM job was only ever going to be temporary (there was a freeze on recruitment at the time, so a permanent post was completely out of the question). Anyway, I already had my second job arranged, so there was no point in hanging around any longer.

But, although my second job at BDP was permanent, somehow I never saw it as offering any long-term future. Why, I don't know. I stayed, I think, for about a year and then I returned to the warm bosom of academe and a post-graduate research fellowship at Manchester Polytechnic. Although, for lots or reasons too tedious to mention here, the bosom of Manchester wasn't quite as warm and comforting as I'd expected. And so I've decided to skip those parts of my career when I wasn't actually working as a designer (not least because this blog can't justify a day trip to Manchester just to photograph a building). But leaving Manchester and returning to employment in London was pretty darn difficult - not the doing, but finding a job. Which is how I came to wind up here:

Working on the third floor (or maybe it was the fourth) of the London College of Furniture (now - like nearly every other college in the country - part of a University)  as a graphics technician. It's in a part of London that's best described as gritty. And I spent most of my time there not wanting to be there. But it took me a while to escape.

i've never worked on the ground floor (#2)

The thing about having Ko as a guest author is that there aren't any rules to the arrangement, so I never know when he's going to pop up. And that invitation he showed you yesterday: that was part of a stationery range for Studio Dumbar that won a D&AD Silver Award in 1981:

Which, ironically, was the very thing that put me in touch with Ko in the first place. And looking at that page again, I wonder what became of the art director, Heleen Tigler Wybrandi? Maybe Ko will tell us.

Anyway, back to buildings, and after three months at IBM I moved two tube stations to the east and to the basement of 16 Gresse Street, and the Presentation Unit of Building Design Partnership. A building that's no longer there.

And I didn't know it at the time, but after three sunny months in Mayfair, things were destined to become somewhat darker as the whole country moved into the winter months. And arranging work schedules and commuting times during the three-day week became something of a struggle. Mirrored, perhaps, by one of the tasks allotted to me as the Junior Designer: I was regularly sent out to buy mounting board from a suppliers in High Holborn (named Kettles, I think). A nice break you'd imagine: well, until I had to face the wind tunnel on the way back that was the street-level effect of Centre Point. And, despite the adherence to the principles of modernism that the Presentation Unit espoused, there were no visits from the likes of Muller-Brockman here. No, the only notable visitor that we had was the developer of Centre Point, Harry Hyams (and, no, he didn't shake my hand).

But there were some lighter moments to relieve the gloom. I recall that, for some reason, I had to buy a single rail ticket back home to Southampton one Friday evening. And at that time, to buy a ticket at Waterloo you had to go to the correct ticket window (they were arranged alphabetically - A to E, that sort of thing - so to buy a ticket to Southampton you had to go to the 'S' window). Anyway, Waterloo was heaving and the queue stretched the whole width of the concourse. Immediately ahead of me in the queue were a middle-aged American couple who, when they eventually reached the window, asked for "two tickets to Stonehenge, please". But that Friday was obviously their lucky night, because the nearest rail station to Stonehenge is Salisbury, which just happens to be served by trains running out of Waterloo.

i've never worked on the ground floor (#1)

This is something that's been running through my thoughts - off and on - for a long time, and something that I thought might prove a suitable subject to post up here: document all the buildings I'd ever worked in. When I say worked in, I mean worked as a designer. I'm not quite sure where to draw the boundaries: I had a couple of career breaks fairly early on, so should places I went to then (still working, but not as a designer) still count? Let's see as we go along.

The funny thing is, though, that I've never worked on the ground floor of any building (as a designer, that is). Somehow they don't seem to go together, do they: design studios and the ground floors of buildings?

Anyway, here's building number one: the place where I started out my career as a designer. It's on the corner of James Street and Wigmore Street in London's Mayfair, and I was fresh up from the country. It was then the central London office of IBM and I was working up there on the fourth floor, in the design studio (and where I met and shook hands with Josef Muller-Brockmann). It's also where I learned (from Peter) how to experiment with Cow Gum. Ah, happy days. Summer in the city, really.

Because my time at IBM was fairly short: just three months (mind you, it started out at six weeks, but got extended a couple of times). The thing is, I'd secured my second job even before I'd left college, but it couldn't be taken up until the October of that year. So I wrote to IBM and asked if they would take me on in the interim as part of their graduate placement scheme (ie employing students during their summer vacation). Which they did. Which was nice of them.

I went back there yesterday to take that picture and it's funny how very little has changed (in terms of the physical environment). The building's no longer occupied by IBM, though. And the ground floor isn't occupied at all: it's just empty retail space - a sign of the times, perhaps. But do you know what struck me most, the contrast between then and now? It's that now everybody seems to take their lunch out on the pavements. The upper part of James Street and Barrett Street running down to St Christophers Place is full of cafés and restaurants spilling out onto the pavement. You didn't get that sort of thing in the 1970s: we all took packed lunches to work.

And what else has stuck in my mind? The record that I bought with my first pay packet:

'Every Picture Tells a Story'. How apt.