Since its founding in 1985, SCP has nurtured generations of talent, from Jasper Morrison to Andu Masebo. As it marks 40 years with an exhibition tracing its legacy, its influence on contemporary design remains undeniable
While London is still a city in which many of the world’s most successful designers live and work, if they want to make furniture on an industrial scale, they have to travel. The influential manufacturers for the upmarket home are mostly Italian or Danish, with some of the best-known names, such as Cassina or Hay, being American-owned. Vitra is Swiss, though its biggest factory is in Germany.
There are a few exceptions: foremost, Sheridan Coakley, who started making furniture in 1985 when he set up SCP with a showroom in Shoreditch. As a brand name, it showed a certain degree of self-awareness. Coakley had begun his career with a shop located off London’s Portobello Road selling vintage tubular steel chairs made before World War II by Practical Equipment Ltd, known by its initials as PEL.
But Coakley has never been about nostalgia; he wanted to sell new designs, and to make things on his own account. He had seen Café Costes in Paris the previous year, the bar that made Philippe Starck into a design world celebrity, and he opened his own showroom with an exhibition of Starck’s playful furniture designs. Forty years later, SCP is one of the few British brands that is still making innovative design. It is celebrating with an exhibition in its Shoreditch base titled An Imperfect Archive, that includes prototypes and pieces by a remarkable collection of designers, architects and artists, from Jasper Morrison to Rachel Whiteread. At the same time, Coakley has commissioned a range of new work that SCP launched in Milan in April.
Coakley’s imperfect archive, one which was built up almost absent-mindedly, serves to illuminate 40 years of contemporary culture in Britain, a period during which SCP has served as a crossover point between design, art, music and politics.
Now that the 1980s have receded far enough into history’s rear-view mirror to take on a certain period charm, it’s easy to forget that 1985 was a lot less fun than it might look from today’s distance. Margaret Thatcher was halfway through her 11 years as prime minister. The British had gone through a war in the Falklands, 3.4 million unemployed, a confrontation with the miners, riots in Brixton and Katharine Hamnett’s trip to Downing Street wearing a T shirt emblazoned with the message “58% don’t want Pershing”.
Factories were closing, manufacturing was moving to Asia. Students trained as ‘industrial’ designers had no industry to work for, creating a phenomenon documented in a prescient exhibition at the Crafts Council titled Industry of One: Designer Makers in Britain 1981-2001. Jasper Morrison, Ron Arad, Tom Dixon and others tried to unlock the potential of mass production by initiating the manufacturing process themselves, using found objects and technology as best as they could to produce what were essentially one-offs.
Against this background, SCP was almost on its own in being prepared to manufacture the work of a talented generation of young designers. Coakley was the only person in Britain interested in turning Morrison’s ideas into commercial products, or those of Matthew Hilton, or Konstantin Grcic. Thirty years later he was one of the first manufacturers to work with the Canadian designer Philippe Malouin.
In the early 1980s Jasper Morrison was still a student at the Royal College of Art, and started coming to SCP to see what interesting new things Coakley had in stock. The graphic designer Peter Saville had just moved to London from Manchester and was ready to barter a logo design for the pieces he needed to furnish his flat.
Coakley had the ambition to look beyond the sometimes parochial nature of the London design scene. He took SCP to Milan’s Salone del Mobile. In the 1990s, he made possible a pioneering project (Please Touch) involving artists, including Rachel Whiteread and Michael Craig-Martin, in design.
The endless years of the Conservative government finally came to an end when Tony Blair came to power. Peter Mandelson had already been photographed for Vogue by Tony Snowdon seated in his leather Balzac club chair that Matthew Hilton designed for SCP. When Mandelson became a government minister his department bought another one for his office. Contemporary design became a signifier for Britain and SCP was an essential part of its vocabulary.
In 2003, SCP acquired upholstery works in Suffolk. It was the start of the company’s commitment to manufacturing, and also to phasing out the use of foam, which is both unsustainable, and (because of UK regulations) treated with potentially harmful chemicals. In recent years SCP has made all its own designs foam-free.
SCP has been shaped by Coakley’s particular sensibility. He has always been ready to work with a wide variety of voices: Nigel Coates’ anthropomorphism; the reduced-to-the-essentials work of Jasper Morrison, Terence Woodgate and James Irvine. He has worked on textiles with Donna Wilson, and with Reiko Kaneko to make ceramics and fine bone china in Staffordshire. He is open to new ideas wherever they come from. SCP works with graduates of Design Academy Eindhoven, as well as Brooklyn start-ups, such as Piet Hein Eek and Rich Brilliant Willing, Fort Standard and Pearson Lloyd.
Coakley has continually set out to find new things, or new ways of doing old things, that interest him. It is perfectly true that we have worked through many conceivable approaches to designing a chair. But that does not mean that we should stop trying, any more than we will stop designing new shirts. Furniture, seen through the lens of 40 years of SCP, is a reflection of the wider sensibility. An interior in 2025 is not the same as an interior in 1985. SCP, and Coakley, have done more than most people to shape both.
This article is taken from Port issue 36. To continue reading, buy the issue or subscribe head here
