An essay for The Imperfect Archive, celebrating 40 years of distinctive design.
Sheridan Coakley started making furniture in 1985 when he set up SCP. As a brand name, it showed a certain degree of self awareness. He had begun his career with a shop located off London’s Portobello Road selling PEL products, vintage tubular steel chairs made before World War II by the brilliantly titled company Practical Equipment Ltd. Choosing to use three initials for his own business could be seen as a kind of tribute.
SCP is more than a quotation. Like PEL, or a handful of other prewar British manufacturers such as Isokon, established by Jack Pritchard and Wells Coates, and Gerald Summers and Marjorie Butcher who set up their business Makers of Simple Furniture, Sheridan was looking at a particularly English form of modernism. It was modernism infused with the bracing atmosphere of Suffolk, Marcel Breuer working in plywood, Walter Gropius building a village college at Impington outside Cambridge, the intellectually improving orange spined Penguin paperbacks, and the sensibility that comes from craftsmanship.
But SCP has never been about nostalgia. Sheridan wanted to make things on his own account, and to do things that were new. PEL, Isokon and Makers of Simple Furniture were relevant as pioneers for a relatively short period, a decade or two at the most. Perhaps because Sheridan has always been prepared to explore new directions, SCP is still an important creative influence today 40 years after it opened in Shoreditch with an exhibition of Philippe Starck furniture.
Sheridan had seen the Café Costes in Paris the previous year, long before Starck’s fascination with celebrity became apparent. He saw his work as a restatement of PEL’s particular variety of modernism. He is still as open to new ideas wherever they come from, as he has ever been. SCP works with graduates of the Eindhoven Design Academy, as well as Brooklyn start-ups, Piet Hein Eek, Ishinomaki Laboratory, Jason Miller and Pearson Lloyd.
Some people keep everything, either because they can’t help themselves, or because they start out in life convinced that they are embarking on a career that one day will be considered important enough to be documented by dedicated archivists wearing white gloves. Sheridan is neither a hoarder, nor self important. But what SCP describes as an imperfect archive, one which was built up almost absent-mindedly, does trace a fascinating path in the place of design in a wider context. It serves to illuminate 40 years of contemporary culture in Britain, a period during which SCP has served as a cross over 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 half way through her eleven years as prime minister. She had survived 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 tee shirt emblazoned with the message “58 per cent don’t want Pershing”. For the benefit of those who weren’t around at the time, Pershing was the missile Ronald Reagan planned to bring to Europe to deter the Soviet Union.
Britain was a different country then. Its largest car builder was called British Leyland. It could make more than a million cars a year. Unfortunately nobody wanted to buy the Triumph Acclaim, the Austin Montego or the Morris Marina.
James Dyson was working on launching the G Force, the bagless vacuum cleaner coloured a sex toy shade of pink in Japan, a design that eventually made him a billionaire. Other design conscious manufacturers from the period did less well. After the success of the ZX personal computer, Clive Sinclair crashed and burned with his misconceived C5 electric vehicle that was launched in the same year that SCP opened.
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. Jasper Morrison, Ron Arad, Tom Dixon and others tried to achieve 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. Sheridan was the only person in Britain interested in turning Morrison’s ideas into commercial products, or those of Matthew Hilton, or Konstantin Grcic. Three decades later he was one of the first manufacturers to work with the Canadian designer Philippe Malouin. Sheridan never saw what he was doing as a taste crusade, or an ideology. He took everything a step or two at a time. He was working with designers, some of whom would turn into celebrities, not because he was under the mistaken impression that their signature alone would be enough to make a product sell. He had to produce sofas and tables and chairs at prices that would attract customers. It was a company built on substance, rather than on image.
Sheridan started selling modern furniture at the time that Peter Saville had just moved to London from Manchester where he had reinvigorated the album cover as a not so minor art form, and was ready to barter a design for a logo for the pieces of furniture that he needed to equip his flat. The Saville graphic identity, the Shoreditch showroom that opened long before the charms of the EC2 postcode became widely known signified a lot about SCP. Early on Sheridan had the ambition to look beyond the sometimes parochial nature of the London design scene. He took SCP to Milan’s Salone del Mobile.
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 Balzac leather upholstered club chair that Mathew Hilton designed for SCP in 1991. When Mandelson became a government minister his department acquired another one for his office. Contemporary design became a signifier for Britain and SCP was an essential part of its vocabulary.
In the 1990s, Sheridan made possible a pioneering project (Please Touch, SCP 1999) to involve artists, including Rachel Whiteread and Michael Craig Martin in design. He made chairs designed by Nigel Coates, architect of one of the more convincing installations in the Millennium Dome.
In 2003, SCP acquired an upholstery works in Norfolk. It was the start of the company’s commitment to phasing out the use of foam, which is both unsustainable and, because of UK fire safety regulations, is treated with potentially harmful chemicals. In recent years SCP has made all its own designs foam free.
SCP has been shaped by Sheridan’s particular sensibility. He has always been ready to work with a wide variety of voices, Matthew Hilton’s sculptural inclinations, the reduced to the essentials work of Jasper Morrison, Terence Woodgate and James Irvine. He has worked on textiles with Donna Wilson and Reiko Kaneko to make ceramics in Staffordshire.
Sheridan has continually set out to find new things or new ways of doing old things that interest him. It is perfectly true as many critics suggest that we have worked through every conceivable approach to designing a chair. But that does not mean that we should stop trying, any more than we will still stop designing new shirts. Furniture, seen through the lens of 40 years of SCP is a reflection of the wider world. An interior in 2025 is not the same as an interior in 1985. SCP, and Sheridan, have done more than most people to shape both.
