Post-war and mid-century: the sofa loses its springs, 1945–1970

In brief. Between 1945 and 1970 the British sofa lost its springs, its horsehair and most of its bulk: foam padding over rubber webbing on a light beech or steel frame replaced the coil-sprung, hair-stuffed suite of the 1930s. The look that went with it — low back, slim loose cushions, tapered legs and a show-wood arm — was named “Contemporary” at the Festival of Britain in 1951 and sold to a mass market by firms such as Hille, Race, G Plan and HK. By the late 1960s the same construction had produced the self-assembly sofa and the everyday sofa bed.

Britain Can Make It

1946V&A exhibition; Race’s cast-aluminium BA3 chair shown

Festival of Britain

19518.5 million visitors; Antelope, Springbok, Calyx

Utility controls end

1952–53Supply order of 1952; restrictions gone by 1953

G Plan launched

1953E. Gomme, High Wycombe: modular furniture for the mass market

Foam “in place of bulky springs”

1959Race’s Flamingo chair, Council of Industrial Design award

How did the Utility scheme end, and what came after it?

The Utility Furniture Scheme, set up by the Board of Trade in 1941 to ration the wood and labour that furniture used, did not end with the war; its restrictions ran on until 1953. The V&A’s copy of the Board’s General Specification for Utility Furniture of 1948 records the system: approved designs only, with controlled dimensions and materials for everything from chairs to play-pens, and the result, in the museum’s words, was “straight edged, plain and unembellished”. Every approved piece carried the CC41 mark; the Museum of the Home’s Chiltern dining chair, designed in October 1942 by Edwin Clinch and Herbert Cutler and made by Moss Partners of Enfield until 1948, is stamped CC41 255 under its drop-in seat, and its cover is not leather but brown rexine, a coated cloth. The stamp mattered to the buyer for a plain reason: as the museum puts it, it “proved the chair conformed to the scheme and meant the buyer did not have to pay tax on it”.

Upholstered Utility seating already had the slim silhouette the next twenty years would make fashionable. The Museum of the Home’s winged side chair by Howard Keith, made by HK Furniture of London between 1948 and 1953 and marked CC41 / 310 / F631, is a beech-legged, wool-covered chair with piped edges — the “Encore” model, though an earlier label called it “Bambino”. At the same time a Lloyd Loom woven-fibre armchair from W. Lusty & Sons of Bromley-by-Bow, Utility model no. 3, was being made from 1947 in a factory rebuilt after the Blitz.

The way out was signposted before the scheme closed. In the autumn of 1946 the Council of Industrial Design — founded by the government in 1944 — staged Britain Can Make It at the V&A, fourteen weeks, more than 3,000 objects and nearly 1.5 million visitors, under a catalogue that told them “the future of British design rests, in the long run, with you.” Ernest Race’s BA3 dining chair, designed in 1945, was the sensation of the furniture section: a frame of five die-cast aluminium parts, the casting process borrowed from bomb casings, with a seat of green duck cotton dyed in surplus military uniform dye over rubberised hair. Aluminium was one of the few unrationed materials, and the first big order was 1,500 chairs for troop ships. The remaining Utility controls on furniture were wound down by Board of Trade orders in 1952 — the Utility Furniture (Supply) Order 1952 is on the statute book — and, the V&A notes, the furniture itself was rejected as soon as people were free to reject it.

What was the Festival of Britain style?

“Contemporary” was the name given to the light, angular, brightly coloured furniture and textiles shown on the South Bank in the summer of 1951, and it was the first British sofa style invented for a mass market rather than inherited from a country house. The Festival marked the centenary of the Great Exhibition, drew 8.5 million visitors to London and the regions, and was intended, in the phrase the V&A still uses, as “a tonic for the nation”. Its Homes and Gardens pavilion put Robin Day’s furniture in room settings with Lucienne Day’s fabrics; Robin Day also designed all the seating for the Royal Festival Hall.

Who made the British mid-century sofa?

A small number of firms, most of them within fifty miles of London, defined the look. Hille of London commissioned Robin Day in 1949 to design for mass production, and over the next forty-four years he gave the firm more than 150 designs; the V&A holds his Hillestak-type plywood and beech chairs of 1950, the Q Stak of 1954 and the 700 armchair of about 1956, a single sheet of bent plywood forming seat, arms and back on tubular steel legs with rubber feet, its grey synthetic-fabric cushions screwed to the shell. Race Furniture, founded in 1945, moved from aluminium to steel rod to upholstery. E. Gomme of High Wycombe, a firm founded in 1898 with 300 employees by 1922, introduced G Plan in 1953: furniture designed “so that all the individual items would be compatible in style and dimensions”, which the V&A calls the beginning of modular furniture for the mass market. It was not cheap — a G Plan chest of drawers cost £19 11s 6d in 1957 — and the museum’s Leslie Dandy watercolour of 1954–55 shows the intended customer: a bedsit with G Plan furniture, a single bed with cushions doing duty as a sofa, and an armchair.

Several names people search for are thinner in the museum record. HK Furniture is represented by its Utility-era Encore chair; Parker Knoll appears in the V&A as a textiles firm, through sample books of the late 1970s; Ercol appears only indirectly, as one of the furniture makers — with G Plan and Gordon Russell — whose products were sold with Tibor Reich’s fabrics. The Windsor-derived elm-and-beech settees for which Ercol is remembered, and the sprung bed-settees of Greaves & Thomas, are not in any of the collections cited on this page, so what follows says nothing about their construction that cannot be checked. Designs do survive for the anonymous mainstream: George Fejer’s drawings for settees dated May 1959, April 1960 and 1961 are in the V&A’s prints and drawings collection, and his Gambit armchair of about 1971 for Foster-Len — wooden frame, foam cushion seat and back — shows where the trade had arrived by the period’s end.

Why does mid-century furniture look Danish?

Because British manufacturers copied Denmark, and said so. The V&A’s survey of post-war design records that Scandinavia was the major influence on British makers looking for elegant, modern forms. The type specimen is Finn Juhl’s Model FJ 48 settee, designed in 1948 and made by the cabinet-maker Niels Vodder until 1969: a teak frame carrying a tan leather cover over foam rubber, made by doubling a chair that critics at the 1948 Copenhagen Cabinet Makers’ Guild exhibition thought “beautiful — considered as works of art” but “not really comfortable to sit in for the average person”. Teak, leather over foam, and a frame that is furniture in its own right rather than a hidden carcass — that is what the British teak sofa of the 1960s was reaching for. Denmark arrived in London shops as well as showrooms: a teak-veneered Finmar storage unit of about 1955 in the Museum of the Home was retailed by Heal’s.

When did foam replace horsehair and springs in sofas?

Through the 1950s, and decisively by 1960. Latex foam was an inter-war invention — the Science Museum Group credits Dunlop with developing latex-foam cushioning sold through its Dunlopillo subsidiary between the wars — and polyurethane, first made in Germany in 1937, went into commercial foam production in 1953, according to the Museum of Design in Plastics at Arts University Bournemouth. In the museum record the change shows up as a sequence: Race’s BA3 of 1945 padded with rubberised hair; Michael Inchbald’s Mambo chair of 1955 with Dunlopillo foam-rubber cushions; Race’s Flamingo of 1959 with foam “in place of bulky springs”; Roland Gibbard’s three-seat sofa of 1963 with six detachable foam cushions; and the Lupton Morton Campus sofa of 1968, a foam-cushioned frame the buyer assembled at home.

When did the sofa bed become popular?

The convertible bed-settee became a designed object, rather than a trade convenience, in the mid-1950s, and a mass-market one by the end of the 1960s. Robin Day’s Single Convertible Bed-Settee for Hille, designed in 1956 and made in 1957, won the Council of Industrial Design’s Design of the Year award in 1957. The V&A’s example (CIRC.508-1968) is 192.5 cm long: a mahogany veneer on a matt black steel frame, its back upholstered in grey tweed, with a loose grey-covered mattress that is both the seat and the bed. It is a day-bed in the seventeenth-century sense — a long seat with a raised back — rebuilt in the materials of 1957. The Museum of the Home’s Campus sofa of 1968, made by Lupton Morton of Wallingford, is described by the museum as a “three-seater sofa or day bed”: a self-assembly beech frame, a seat cushion and back cushions of foam in brown Hay fabric, 197.5 cm wide and only 62 cm high. Between them they describe the spare-room sofa of the next fifty years, in which the thing that folds is not the frame but the cushion.

What fabrics covered a 1950s sofa?

Printed and woven cottons, rayons and wools in abstract patterns, from a handful of progressive mills, and increasingly PVC where wear mattered. Lucienne Day’s Calyx of 1951 was designed for Heal’s to hang beside Robin Day’s furniture in the Festival room settings — Heal’s hesitated over so radical a pattern before agreeing — and “plants and the sense of growth … the kind of upward movement”, as she put it, replaced the floral chintz of the 1930s. Marian Mahler, who came to Britain from Vienna in 1937, designed screen-printed cotton crêpe for David Whitehead of Rawtenstall, whose business was “vibrant contemporary textile prints for the mass-market”; the V&A’s 1952 length (CIRC.8-1953) is blue with red, white and olive-green boomerangs and crescents. Tibor Reich, working at Stratford-upon-Avon with six employees in 1945 and eighty by the 1970s, won the Council of Industrial Design award in 1957 for Flamingo, its texture derived from photographic enlargements of leaves; his cloths went on to Concorde and the royal yacht, and were sold with G Plan, Ercol and Gordon Russell furniture. Edinburgh Weavers, founded in 1928 under Alastair Morton, produced the fine-art end — the Museum of the Home’s Pheasant Moon of 1960–61 by Hans Tisdall, screen-printed on a rayon-and-cotton slub. Upholstery seldom survives with its fabric intact, but the covers that do — grey tweed on Day’s bed-settee, dark blue wool on the Flamingo, blue wool on Gibbard’s sofa, brown Hay cloth on the Campus — are plain woven wools, with the pattern kept for curtains.

The “leather look” had a longer history than its name suggests. Rexine, a coated cloth, was the Utility cover on the Chiltern chair; PVC sleeved the springs of Race’s Springbok in 1951 in red, yellow, blue or grey; and Day’s 700 chair of about 1956 wore a woven synthetic. Coated and synthetic covers were the period’s answer to wear and to cost, on the seats that had to survive children and kitchens.

What did a 1950s and 1960s living room look like?

Poorer and more crowded than the museum pieces suggest, until the 1960s. The Museum of the Home’s reconstructed Room Upstairs in 1956 is a rented bedroom in a new terraced house in Camden, furnished for a newly married Irish couple with dark wood, a single wooden chair, floral curtains and woodchip wallpaper painted magnolia — no sofa at all. By 1964 the same museum’s donors, a solicitor and a housewife in Epping, had a newly built modern house and furnished it with Hille: their orange wool Robin Day armchair and ottoman of 1970 on white moulded ABS swivel bases came to the collection from them. Frank Stanton’s painting of his own Islington front room in 1968 shows the other route: a bentwood chair with a blue cushion, flock wallpaper and plants. The teak-and-tweed living room of memory was built between those points, out of G Plan units, a low sofa on tapered legs and a Tibor or Heal’s curtain.

Materials: what went where, and why

Leather or fabric?

Fabric, overwhelmingly, and for the first time the fabric was the point. The Contemporary sofa was sold as a foil for a printed curtain and a plain wool cover in a Festival colour, and every upholstered British object cited here — the Encore, the BA3, the bed-settee, the Flamingo, Gibbard’s sofa, the Campus — is covered in cloth. Leather in this period reads as Danish: Juhl’s teak settee is tan hide over foam rubber, and it is the leather-and-teak pairing, not the buttoned hide of the club, that the 1960s British teak sofa imitated when it could afford to. Where the cover had to work hard, the answer was coated or synthetic cloth — rexine on Utility seats, PVC on Race’s outdoor Springbok, a woven synthetic on Day’s 700 — rather than leather, which was priced for the top of the market. The modern buyer’s choice inverts the period’s: a mid-century form today is more often ordered in leather than its makers ever produced it.

What survives in a sofa made today

Five ideas from 1945–1970 are still in production, though none of them is sold today under a mid-century name. The comparisons below pair each with a piece made in England today; neither maker offers a splayed-leg, show-wood Contemporary sofa, so each card says plainly what the modern piece shares with the period and what it does not.