What is your early memory that inspired you to design?

I have a few early memories that may have had a bearing on my entering a world of design.
When I was 4 years old, I often visited my two uncles in Stockport who between them, owned two Vintage Lagondas, a house of antiques, a huge collection of Books, Films, Toys and who always had a nostalgic eye for the past, so I was very aware of how Automobiles and Sporting Equipment were designed to suit the time. I loved visiting their house and my Grandparents Shop in Stockport, which were a wealth of visual treats.... all harking from a distant past. Old Fountain Pens, Radios, Fob Watches, Medals, Sporting Trophies, old Photographs and Paintings, Letters and Postcards with old stamps, cigarette holders, Spectacles, Binoculars, Playing Cards, worn out pen knives, pencils.... Cabinets full of trinkets and ornaments, a cellar full of coal, together with shelves of old toys and advertising signs, a backyard overlooked by the Brewery behind a tall red brick wall, within which we played with an old leather Casey football, a cast iron mangle and washing lines with wooden dolly pegs, an attic stacked with Accounts Books, Diaries and Dossiers, Iron Stamps, Staplers, Hole Punches and Cameras..... always something to handle and play with. Both infused, to my sensibility, with a comfortingly musty smell of the past.
The Streets of Stockport where I first grew up, not a stones throw away from L S Lowry’s Painted Streets and Factories, were all cobbled, where heavy Drays were pulled by Shire Horses from the Old Robinsons Brewery and the Steam Hammer puffed and chuffed all day and night. Even the Milk and the Coal were still delivered by horse carts. All the Buildings and houses were coated in black soot and I don’t remember anything in colour until one Summers day, when my Mother came out of the General Post Office with a Bright Red Umbrella and we crossed the Yorkstone pavement and cobbled road to her meet friend who had just purchased a Pink Isetta BMW Bubble Car. It was the cutest thing I had ever seen and my first introduction to anything in colour..... I’m sure the whole world was in black and white until that moment.
Probably the most extraordinary thing I ever saw, was when one our teenage babysitter at my Huncoat Avenue home had a boyfriend drive by to pick her up in his brand new Red 1960’s E Type Jag. It was more like a spaceship than the old black Fords and sage green Rovers that passed for automobiles back then. It certainly caught my attention. Before I was 5 years old, I needed to have my tonsils out and entered Stepping Hill Hospital, with its old Victorian tiling and half painted eau de nil walls, terrifying shiny sharp chrome syringes in kidney shaped Bowls. 

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Crisply laundered Nurses, who were so strict and even slapped me across the face, when I couldn’t stop crying for my mother......and that strong smell of antiseptic and carbolic acid.... never did I ever think I would one day be designing a Victorian Style Hospital, where all those memories came flooding back to me.
The first time I saw my Father at work was in a little Drawing Office in St Mary’s Butts, Reading when I was six years old, just after we had just moved home to the South of England. He had his own Drafting Table, which had a place for all his propelling pencils, erasers, Technical Instruments in their purple velvet case and fine Rotring Pens. He sat on a tall stool and smoked Embassy cigarettes in a golden haze.
He then changed jobs and moved to an Office in Cheapside, Reading, behind the Art Deco Odeon Cinema, where I saw Zulu, The Battle of Britain, Dr. No, The Charge of The Light Brigade and Sound of Music, to name a few. There were Drawing Desks and stools as before, but as kids we peered over the tables with huge Scale Models of Reading Town Centre, surveying the new Inner Distribution Road (IDR) Designs Before and After, in which the old Victorian Town would be transformed into a modern working 20th Century Metropolis. I always loved touching and looking at my fathers Drawing Instruments, Scale Rulers, Propelling pencils and looking over the Plans and Town Maps, he brought home. When 9 years old, I took a Scale Ruler to school and my form teacher asked if I had permission from my father. As I did not, he then used said implement on edge, to rap across the back of my fingers..... brutal, or perhaps just a normal Catholic upbringing. However, the most important early memory that truly inspired me, was when Powell & Pressburger’s 'A Matter Of Life & Death‘ was screened late one night on our new Colour Television, which had just replaced our old 60’s Space Age streamlined Sony TV...... a British film which totally changed my perception of Film Making and opened my eyes
 to Film Design.

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After 4 years at Chelsea School of Art, I had prepared and intended to Study for an MA at Atelier 63 in Haarlem, Holland, but circumstances led me to having an Exhibition of work in a Gallery in Fulham, London in the late summer of 1980. I suggested the owner should consider using the Gallery in which he also lived and held huge social parties, as a Film Studio. A year later, he asked if I could come in and find a way to make money in any way I thought fit. Fulham Studios became one of the busiest studios in London within a year. It was 1981 and opened up not only a career for me in the Film Industry at the very birth of Pop Videos, but also allowed me the freedom to start designing.