Émigré designers in the University of Brighton Design Archives

Incredibly, seventeen years have passed since Jonathan Woodham wrote in these pages of the ‘rich and open-ended’ possibilities offered by the newly-opened archive of the world’s first state-sponsored design body, the Design Council, at the University of Brighton, United Kingdom. This special issue allows us to update the international readership of the journal, following the arrival of eighteen further collections, and a series of name changes. Here we introduce the substantial representation of émigré designers in the Archives’ collections. This may be helpful in the cases of those papers that have reached us comparatively recently, and where fully itemised listings are not yet available. This article provides a speculative introduction to the rich research potential of the archives of five European designers who relocated to England between the years 1933 and 1939, from where many of them developed international networks of contacts and influence. They are Natasha Kroll (1914 - 2004), FHK Henrion (1914-1990), Willy de Majo (1917-1993), Hans Arnold Rothholz (1919-2000), and Bernard Schottlander (1924-1999). These designers cannot easily be placed within the ambit of existing research into the influence of émigrés on cultural heritage, because design remains a relatively unexplored area of émigré activity