Albert Henry Woodfull

'Woody' Woodfull (pictured left in October 2002) can rightly be celebrated as one of the key figures in introducing the discipline of industrial design into the British plastics industry. Albert Henry Woodfull was  born in 1912 and trained as a silversmith at the Vittoria School of Jewellery and Silversmithing, Birmingham. He  subsequently attended an experimental course in product design at the Birmingham College of Art and Craft.

The majority of AHW's working life was spent with British Industrial Plastics, starting in 1934 as a product designer at BIP's Streetly Manufacturing Company with a brief "to bring art to an artless industry" AHW headed the prestigious BIP Product Design Unit from 1951 until his retirement in 1970. The unit was responsible for the design of hundreds of products, many of which have become design classics. So successful was the unit that after winning the Homers award for design a number of times it was eventually barred from competing to gives others a chance of winning.

'Woody' brought style to mass-produced plastic products. In the 1930's the influence of Art Deco was evident in many of his designs such as the Ardath cigarette boxes, which are classic examples and are now highly sought after by collectors. The Bourn-Vita 'sleeping beaker' and lid capture the essence of design at the time of the Festival of Britain (1951). Melamine formaldehyde tableware (Melaware and Gaydon) are seen as a watershed for plastics design, and their stunning forms and colours dictated current styling.