My Modern Movement

For those of "advanced" tastes, ​the Modern Movement was a welcome corrective to the debased aesthetics of the commercial world. Massed housing of the 1920s and 30s was as untutored as the products of light industry and both operated far from the enlightened thinking coming out of Central Europe that sought to harness architecture and design to social progress.

Robert Best, the only British industrialist to have trained at art school, shared the goal of better mass education but was troubled...