This visually stunning book, created for a major V&A exhibition, celebrates the best of British design from 1948 to today. Essays by leading curators as well as pieces by key designers--including Peter Saville, Barbara Hulanicki, Paul Smith, and Tom Dixon--build a comprehensive survey of more than 400 of the finest examples of fashion and textiles, furniture, ceramics and glass, theater design, graphics, photography, architecture, and fine art and sculpture from the period. From works commissioned for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II to the globally influential, and very British, counterculture, included here are works created for the 1960s boutiques of Mary Quant and Ossie Clark through the club cultures of punk, the new Romantics, and rave.

Christopher Breward is the head of research at the V&A and a co-curator of the exhibition. Ghislaine Wood is a curator specializing in 20th-century art and design in the Research Department at the V&A.