David Mellor is perhaps best known for his ranges of knives, forks and spoons some of which were designed in the 1960s and 1970s and have become modern classics. For example, 'Pride' was designed in 1953 when he was still a student and has been in continuous production ever since. (Mellor also designed disposable plastic cutlery in 1969 for Cross Paperware which sold in its millions.)

One of David Mellor's first major commissions in the early 1960s was for silverware for British embassies, made with the aim of demonstrating the best of modern British design. The range included the Embassy teapot (1963, V&A), candlesticks and toast rack, as well as Embassy cutlery, all clearly influenced by his travel scholarship to Sweden and Denmark in 1952. 

This week's subject is David Mellor (1920-2009), the outstanding designer and manufacturer whose modern industrial and domestic designs have made such an impact on our daily lives. He was born in Sheffield and trained as a silversmith at Sheffield College of Art and the Royal College of Art. As Stephen Bayley wrote, "He was in every sense a modern industrial designer, and technologically adept, but his spiritual roots were in the arts and crafts movement and its belief, not so much in work-life balance as in work-life integration". 

The photographic archive of Joseph Hardman (1893-1972) at Lakeland Arts documents the changing ways of Lakeland life in the mid-C20. Here we see children and adults picking blackberries with a view of the Winster Valley beyond. Hardman also photographed the local damson harvest for which the Lake District was once famous. Happily, there are now efforts to revive Westmorland damsons in the Lyth Valley. 

Failing the walking stick method (see Monday's Post), blackberry-pickers have always devised ingenious ways of reaching the best fruit. Blackberrying in a Devonshire Lane is by Frank Dadd; it appeared in The Graphic: An Illustrated Weekly Newspaper in 1891. Its light-heartedness is a long way from the complex blackberry-themed poems by Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney.

So popular was blackberrying at one time that London Transport advertised buses to take day-trippers out into the countryside to make the most of the free harvest. The London Transport Museum has a lovely collection of blackberry posters from the 1920s and 30s, including this from 1924 by Walter E Spradbury. 

It is blackberry-picking time, so this week on the Post we look at this still-popular activity.  Harold Harvey painted blackberry pickers in Cornwall at least four times; this is A Walk by the Sea; the Blackberry Gatherers (1921). The little girl's walking stick would be used to pull down higher branches in order to reach the ripe fruit without  tangles and scratches.