of authority; Hugh Casson, Robert Goodden, ‘Dick’ Russell, Misha Black, Richard Guyatt. In time they and their students and successors would bring the United Kingdom to a place of respectability in realms of art and design that had somehow lost their way in the last quarter of the industrial revolution. For the moment it remained an uphill struggle to convince the British that such subjects could decently be placed in a school curriculum much less a university programme.

In the early post-war years it was not so much official or academic institutions that set the pace, but rather an irreverent journal with offices opposite MI5's in Queen Anne’s Gate and headlines that made the tabloids of the day look decidedly anaemic. The Architectural Review, with its heady mixture of publishing zeal and editorial excellence, spoke eloquently on all the great design issues of the day and did not hesitate to tell the Design Council, the art colleges or the RIBA if it thought they had taken a wrong turning. It fulminated against the destruction of the English public house and some of the fine Victorian furnishings that went with it. To underline its point of view it established its own pub on the premises, the ‘Bride of Denmark’, which became one of the most popular centres of entertainment in London. It was to the AR’s motley cast that the world listened; Casson the joint editor, John Betjeman the irrepressible Victorian, H de C Hastings the owner who never allowed business to interrupt an episode of the Archers, the brilliant art editor Gordon Cullen and his assistant Donald Dewar Mills whose