Denmark in Britain

Preface

Born in the mid-1970s, my life post-dates by a short interval the end of the period for study here. My father is from Aalborg in Denmark and my mother is from Glasgow in Scotland and I have spent lengthy and enjoyable periods of my life in Denmark while living mostly in the UK. In childhood, our home in central Scotland contained my father’s 1960s Danish furniture from the flat he had rented in Copenhagen as a young man before marriage and we used cutlery, ate off dishes, cooked in pots and used kitchen utensils that were Danish too, much of which had been given to my parents as wedding gifts by Danish relatives. In Glasgow – which in the 1970s was a dark and decrepit-looking city – a frequent highlight was lunching in the Danish Food Centre in St Vincent Street. Within, it was an oasis of up-to-date Danish design and the menu, which included smørrebrød (open sandwiches) and a cold table buffet, was plentiful and delicious. Entering the restaurant felt like temporarily upgrading to a better way of living and was a pleasant break before facing Glasgow’s wet, cold and dirty streets once more. (Since the 1970s, the city has, of course, been greatly transformed for the better.)

The start of the annual summer holiday to Denmark meant driving south in my parents’ Triumph Herald car to North Shields near to Newcastle to board the ferry for Esbjerg. If Glasgow’s post-industrial suburbs were bleak, North Tyneside’s appeared worse, though they too have since experienced regeneration. After negotiating streets of run-down terraces, interspersed with decaying factory buildings, we would arrive at Tyne Commission Quay to board either the England or the Winston Churchill – both vessels of the DFDS shipping company, built in the 1960s with all that implied in terms of elegant Danish design. Upon embarkation, passengers immediately felt they had arrived in an offshore capsule of Danish-ness. The saloons were lined in teak and rosewood; all of the furniture and pretty much every element of inventory was made in Denmark and there was a distinct aroma of Prince cigarettes, Viennerbrød (Danish pastries) being baked and pork being cooked in the galley. These ships were probably among the first environments in which I really noticed ‘design’, in that everything was beautifully co-ordinated, with shadow-gaps between the panels and lovely soft lighting that looked especially effective once night fell and we were heading over the North Sea. Of course, the cuisine in the dining saloon was always a highlight, assuming the weather was sufficiently calm to enable it to be enjoyed.

Decades later, having failed in my own attempt at a design career and become instead a design historian, I became increasingly aware that the fragments of Danish design and lifestyle I had experienced as a child fitted into a much bigger picture of Denmark – a small country in an increasingly cosmopolitan post-war western world – achieving cultural influence through the promotion of the skills of its modern architects and designers. How this success was orchestrated and accomplished was a matter of curiosity for me, particularly living in Scotland, a country of similar population size now also seeking more strongly to assert itself culturally in an increasingly crowded world of objects, images, texts and mediation.