Miles and miles of fine tiles

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Modernism is viewed as white, simple and undecorated: pattern and Modernism are considered odd bedfellows. Yet when Britain adopted this architectural style in the wake of the Second World War, so great was the desire to bring colour and exuberance back into dreary Austerity Britain, that ornament found its way into buildings by some of the country's leading modernist architects.

Colour and pattern were introduced through fabric and tiling, and the doyenne of tile design, Peggy Angus, whose simple inventive tiles graced schools, colleges and homes around the capital, is the subject of an exhibition at MoDA, the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture.

Angus trained at the RCA in the mid-Twenties alongside artists Edward Bawden and Eric Ravillious, and she was introduced to Modernist ideals by the architect and critic JM Richards, whom she married.

She became a teacher, eventually returning to her former school, North London Collegiate, where she introduced collaborative projects such as murals, and practical experimentation with pattern through linocuts and potato prints.

It was the latter that caught the eye of leading architect FRS Yorke of YRM and from 1948 onwards he commissioned Angus to design tiles for his buildings.

Unusually for a muralist, Angus started with the individual tile rather than a grand design. That tile became her building block, a basic unit of pattern repeated in different combinations, and a few simple geometric shapes could be used to build up quite complicated and striking murals in very different designs.

One of her most famous was at the Susan Lawrence Primary School, designed as part of the Festival of Britain. Three simple geometric forms were combined to create a spectacular tiled entrance hall, still in place today.

The tiles manufactured by Carter and Co (part of the Poole Pottery) were so successful that they were made available to other architects and builders to use in their own combinations.

Other designs soon followed, many specifically for the domestic market, and Angus's tiles could be found in fireplaces, kitchen splashbacks and in such prestigious projects as the huge mural in the British Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels Expo.

Here she used Romanesque, a tile divided into differently coloured diagonals she had designed in 1951. She depicted a modern industrial landscape, based on a medieval mural. The same tile was used to create abstract geometric patterns in the prestigious new London airport at Heathrow in 1955, then the showcase for Modern Britain.

When architecture moved into a more brutalist stage, with no room for ornamentation, Peggy Angus took her patternmaking skills in another direction. Having reinvented herself in her late thirties as a tile designer, in her sixties she largely abandoned tiles to set up her own studio in Camden to hand-print wallpaper, usually to commission.

She also produced designs for Sanderson, winning a competition in 1960 with Velvet, a huge, repeating-double-snakelike pattern based on one of her tile designs.

The exhibition shows Angus's consummate handling of repeat patterns and offers inspiration to those keen, but a little anxious, about bringing ornamentation into contemporary living.

Auction details

Patterns for Post-War Britain: The tile designs of Peggy Angus, until 5 January, 2003, MoDA, Middlesex University Cat Hill Campus, Barnet (020 8411 5244).

Peggy Angus Study Day, Saturday, 9 November, 10am-4.15pm.

Peggy Angus wallpaper designs are hand-block printed, from reproductions of the original linocuts, by her granddaughter Emma Gibson: £75 a roll (01595 692816).

Tiles based on Peggy Angus Designs are produced by tile-maker Diana Hall, who worked with Angus in the Seventies and Eighties.

Tiles £9.50 each (01725 517475).

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