Class Anxieties at the Britain Can Make It Exhibition: The Uses of (Design) Literacy* (*with apologies to Richard Hoggart)

The most widely represented class was very definitely the artisan working class. Only 1 in 200 said that they thought the exhibition was bad. A dockworker’s wife expressed approval of the plastic kitchen cabinets because she thought “They do keep the mice out.” The COID and British design establishment, through its literature and exhibitions, consistently reinforced the view that good taste in design was a disposition segregated by class. Archive documents show that the BCMI exhibition and accompanying COID publications, were to be instrumental in “raising the public to a state of alert sensibility and giving it a lead” and relied on the hope that the visiting public would “get the idea for itself” and subsequently make better taste decisions. Unfortunately, when left to ‘get the idea for itself’ the public would so often get entirely the wrong idea that the necessity for intervention became clear. The need for some form of conventional ‘design literacy’ was essential. Indeed ‘design literacy’ was to be a government watchword for many years post BCMI and embodied frequent vain attempts to reform working class taste. In contrast to this were the works produced by Dennis Chapman and Richard Hoggart that celebrated difference and documented the shifting nature of authentic working class taste and domestic conditions, exposing the premise for their style and tastes, analyzing working class domestic interiors and objects taking into account the culture that produced them. This paper examines the uses of ‘design literacy’ in the BCMI exhibition and the continued failure of the project seventy years on