Variations on a theme

Simpson’s in the Strand was the place to buy your gentleman’s wardrobe in the 1930’s. The must-have item was the Daks trouser, pictured here in the ‘Pinpoint’ model from 1938. Sharp as a knife and available in so many different variations it makes the mind boggle – 41 colours and 8 materials.

The store opened in 1935. A striking modernist building by the émigré architect Joseph Emberton. The sleek white curves and tubular steel rails wound their way around five floors of manly consumables. There was a barbershop, a dog shop, a gift shop, a tailoring department, a sports department, a club room…the list goes on.

The shop displays and signage were conceived, initially, by another émigré designer – Lazlo Moholy-Nagy. A bit of a dude himself, Moholy-Nagy had ended up in London via the Bauhaus. His work for Simpson’s rivalled the best work coming out of Germany, which lead the world in shop window display. Both simple and surreal and executed with confidence, Moholy-Nagy wove an aesthetic that held strong for Simpson’s long after he crossed the Atlantic for work in 1937.

The Simpson’s building is now home to a bookshop. There are no ghosts inhabiting the building, it has been cleared of all but the hardiest original decoration and architectural detail. And the windows are unloved.

Enough and no more

Ton. A simple idea for a book, looking at weights. But beautifully executed by Japanese illustrator Taro Miura. The Japanese have really adopted the mantle of illustration these days and the clean, succinct and confident lines of these images are some of the best.

I love the simple, sequential story form in children’s books. It’s a format that can free an illustrator to really make strong symbolic images. I spent many hours as a child looking at The Very Hungry Caterpillar, a seminal book in this style.

The stencil or pochoir illustration really appeals to me. Childlike yet sophisticated, like all the best illustration. This work isn’t about free flowing pencil lines and washed over colours. It is a short sharp shock of image and word.

It seems to me the rigidity of the process, or style - as these illustrations or probably computer generated - of stencilling reduces images to their individual elements, so that they verge on the pictogram.

Miura’s work certainly does. And his other books on construction and tools suggest he has a bit of a thing going for industrial imagery, and the opportunities it gives for exploiting silhouette in illustration form. How lovely it would be to see someone like this let loose on actual signage, especially for a children’s space.

Swept away

I have a book about brushes. I like to know I’m not the only person who thinks too much about such inconsequential items. Some really beautiful brushes are manufactured in Sweden by Iris Hantverk, put together by a visually impaired workforce.

Some of their brushes have popped up in those knowing shops that line Columbia Road in London, precisely aimed at homemakers who don’t. The kind of people who hang tea towels on the wall and have improbably neat sets of herb and spice jars. The kind of people who revel in Labour and Wait’s faux wartime make do and mend aesthetic. Who coo at their regulation fly swats and seed markers, school plimsolls and brown betty teapots.

London is full of people like that. I like London because it can support such improbably twee shops. Because you soon realise you aren’t the only one who will buy a used plant pot with no intention of putting a plant in it.

I haven’t yet found one of these small Hantwerk horse brushes to buy though- it may have to be a trip to Sweden – but the website has many such pared down treasures on it.

Useful yet beautiful. Mr Morris would have approved.