Picture on previous page. In 1990 David Mellor moved his studio, workshops and home from Broom Hall in Sheffield to the Peak National Park in Derbyshire. The five acre site bought from British Gas enabled the Michael Hopkins Partnership to implement some of David’s lifelong precepts about work and environment. The old gasholder foundations made a practical and symbolic contribution to the inspirational Round Building, almost hidden by its rural surroundings, aesthetically and functionally a work place for the new millennium.

He was born in Sheffield in 1930 and has been part and parcel of the place ever since.

The sharp end of his education was provided by the Royal College of Art which he joined in 1951 after learning the basics at Sheffield College of Art. It was the time of the Festival of Britain and of Robin Darwin's stewardship of the Royal College. By a happy chance it was also the time of Gordon Russell's appointment as head of the Council of Industrial Design. The RCA, an institution that had been looked at askance by successive governments since its inception in Victorian times, was just emerging into the daybreak of post-war Britain. New teachers came to give it a ring