Centenary of Azerbaijan-born London designer
Professor Sir Misha Black OBE RDI PPSIAD FRSA (1910-1977)

2010 marks the centenary of the designer Misha Black. Millions of London Transport passengers have become familiar with his work for the Underground, on the Victoria Line (1964-68) and for London Buses (seat fabric design 1977, also used on the District and Jubilee Lines). But not many people outside the design community know the man behind the designs.

Misha Black was born Moisei Tcherny, the son of Lionel Tcherny and Sophia Divinska, in Baku, Azerbaijan (then part of Russia) in 1910. In 1912, the Tcherny family came to London to flee the anti-semitism prevalent in Russia at that time, stoked by the publication of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" in 1905, which is now known to have been an attempt by the Russian secret police to blame political agitation on Russia's Jewish population. On arrival in England, Lionel Tcherny changed the family name to Black (a straight translation of "tcherny" from the Russian).

Despite having had only limited formal training (evening classes at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, and a few months' study in Paris) Misha Black's career as a designer took off very quickly in the 1930s, with work on posters, display stands and interior design for commercial exhibitions. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1936. During the war, Black was principal exhibition architect for the Ministry of Information. After the war, Black was appointed OBE, and with the encouragement of Marcus Brumwell and Sir Herbert Read, he went into partnership with Milner Gray under the name of the Design Research Unit. This consultancy, which was the UK's first multidisciplinary design practice, continues in business today as a division of Scott Brownrigg. Black's fame as a designer resulted from his extensive involvement in the 1951 Festival of Britain, after which he was in constant demand for the rest of his life as a design consultant, mostly to rail companies and airlines. He was appointed Professor of Industrial Design at the Royal College of Art in 1955, and became a Royal Designer for Industry in 1957. He was knighted in 1972.

The Victoria Line was the first entirely new underground line to be built since the beginning of the 20th century: construction started in 1962 and the line was opened in stages between 1968 and 1971. As Design Consultant to London Transport, Black saw the opportunity to revive the design philosophy of Frank Pick (1878-1941), head of London Transport in the 1930s, who promoted a consistent corporate identity (at a time when this concept was a novelty) along with high standards of visual style.

The Design Research Unit designed all aspects of the Victoria Line, the most familiar of which, for passengers, are the station platforms. Grey tiles establish a muted feel, offset by tiled designs set into seat recesses: each station has its own design, based on the station name or the history of the locale, providing an at-a-glance visual identity for each stop, and thus serving a similar function to the abstract tiling patterns used on the station platforms of the earlier tube lines such as the Bakerloo and Northern.

1977 saw the introduction of the orange-yellow-brown-black seating fabric (or "moquette") designed for London Transport by Black. It was used on the District and Jubilee Lines, as well as the London buses brought into service during the 1970s and 1980s. So much of this pattern was produced that a few spare lengths purloined by LT staff to re-cover their lounge furniture were not missed at the time. When this pattern was withdrawn in the late 1990s, some of the used fabric was cleaned and recycled into cushion covers to be sold by the LT Museum in Covent Garden. In 2005, the LT Museum commissioned two variants of Black's design, principally for covering seating within the Museum's café area and lecture theatre (which reopened in late 2007), replacing Black's colours with different palettes appropriate to their setting: for the café, red and three shades of green, and for the lecture theatre, grey and three shades of red. The original 1977 design and the cafe variant are illustrated further down this page. Soft furniture for the home, and other novelty products, can be ordered from the LT Museum Shop in these and other classic moquette designs.

It is worth adding that Misha Black was just one of four talented siblings, all of whom worked in London for at least some of their adult lives.

Misha's elder brother Max (1909-1988) was a philosopher. He read Mathematics at Cambridge, where he attended Wittgenstein's classes and became interested in philosophy and logic. After graduating he taught mathematics at the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle, for five years, before taking up a lectureship at London University's Institute of Education in 1936. He concurrently worked on a doctoral thesis on mathematical logic for which he was awarded a PhD in 1939. In 1940 Max Black and his family moved to America where he took up an appointment at the University of Illinois, moving to Cornell University in New York State in 1946. He helped to build the reputation of Cornell's philosophy department, retiring as professor of philosophy in 1977. He wrote widely on language, logic and conceptual analysis: his magnum opus was his study of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Misha's younger brother Sam (1915-1999) trained as an ophthalmic optician before war service in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Resuming his optician's practice in Henley on Thames after the war, Sam Black also worked part-time for the National Association of Opticians at 65 Brook Street, W1 (an address occupied today by the Argentine Embassy), organising health communication and educational campaigns. In 1948 he joined the newly-formed Institute of Public Relations and was soon editing the Institute's journal. In 1955 he ceased practice as an optician, and went in for public relations and the organisation of conferences and exhibitions full time for the rest of his career, working on export campaigns and trade shows in the UK. In the 1980s he established connections with Stirling University, which was setting up a master's degree course in PR; he was appointed honorary professor in 1988.

Misha's sister Rivka (1920-1967), born Betty Black, was active in progressive politics and the theatre – she adopted the name Rivka during her time (1937-1950) with the left-wing agitprop theatre group the Unity Theatre, where she met her husband Joe Benjamin. Rivka trained as a teacher and taught throughout the war – after the war she designed stage costumes for drama and ballet, often working for the designer Roger Furze at Sadlers Wells. The Benjamin family later moved to Oxfordshire and then to Grimsby, where Rivka worked in adult education. Following the family's return to London, Rivka ended her career as senior lecturer in art at Goldsmiths Teacher Training College in New Cross. She was diagnosed with cancer in the early 1960s and died in 1967. Her son Adam (born 1958) carries the artistic torch for his family these days – an award-winning dancer and choreographer, he lived and worked in London for many years, but now lives in Cornwall and lectures on Theatre and Performance at Plymouth University. Having trained in dance and fine art at Middlesex Polytechnic (1987-1990) Adam founded the London-based CanDoCo dance company for disabled and non-disabled dancers. The film "Destino: a contemporary dance story", which documents Adam's work with the Ethiopian dancers Junaid Jemal Sendi and Addisu Demissie, culminating in a performance of "A holding space" (jointly choreographed with Russell Maliphant) at Sadlers Wells in March 2009, was premiered at the Royal Society of Arts in July 2010. Adam's work "Slight", for the FATHoM project, was performed at Lillian Bayliss in March 2010.

About the author

William Arthurs has been a member of the London Society, and of its Executive Committee, since 2001. He lives in Buckinghamshire.

Misha Black as Professor of Industrial Design at the Royal College of Art (Gordon Lawson) (RCA collection)

The Tcherny family home in Baku is not known to exist today: this is a typical 19th c. merchant's house in Old Baku. (William Arthurs)

Misha Black, 1929 (watercolour, W R Dickens) (collection of Mark Benjamin)

Victoria Line, Stockwell motif by Abram Games OBE RDI (1914-1996): a stylised semi-abstract swan which references the name of a nearby public house (The Swan, 215 Clapham Road, SW9)

Victoria Line, Tottenham Hale motif by Edward Bawden CBE RA (1903-1989): a ferryboat crossing the River Lea

Victoria Line, Seven Sisters motif by Hans Unger (1915-1975): Seven Elm trees on green background

Moquette design by Misha Black for passenger seating fabric on London Transport, 1977 (Editor's collection) with novelty keyfob featuring the 2005 "cafe seating" variant of Black's design. Fabric: wool, with small synthetic component added for strength

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Centenary of Azerbaijan-born London designer Professor Sir Misha Black OBE RDI PPSIAD FRSA (1910-1977)

About the author

Centenary of Azerbaijan-born London designer
Professor Sir Misha Black OBE RDI PPSIAD FRSA (1910-1977)