Before coining the term ‘Creative Salvage’ with Mark Brazier-Jones and Nick Jones, Tom Dixon had been involved in the music business. The genesis of this chair was the DIY attitude they had embraced through outfitting empty warehouses, which were used as nightclubs, with salvaged items.

Tom Dixon first learnt to weld in Paul Richman’s garage in Brixton and ‘fell in love with the molten metal and the speed at which [he] could stick things together’. This chair has a regal yet irreverent bearing, and is made from pieces of nineteenth-century iron railings, legs from a stove and a manhole cover for a seat. The use of salvaged industrially-produced elements in an attempt to realise a classic design, at a time when Britain’s industrial output had been sharply curtailed, can be seen as a political statement.