Following on from yesterday's granite mortar and pestle - as if the gods of design were on a roll- I stumbled yesterday into a tap house in Torcross and found another example of brutal genius: urinals made from sawn-off beer barrels. Forget clinical porcelain – here was a direct cycle of life and lager. What goes in must come out, and what better vessel than the very container that delivered the pint in the first place? It’s poetic really – the circle of pint. No chrome, no gloss, just stainless steel barrels with a chunk carved out, like some Dadaist artwork that dares you to question whether you’re in a pub toilet or a modern gallery.
Taken together, the spice crusher and the barrel urinals prove a point that Britain stubbornly refuses to learn. Stop over-engineering. Stop gilding the lily. You don’t need thirty focus groups, a £10 million contract, and a failed IT system to make something work. You just need a lump of granite, a beer keg with a hole in it, and the good sense to realise that form and function aren’t enemies. Meanwhile, the country sinks billions into schemes that don’t work, when the answer, time and again, is sitting there staring us in the face: simple, honest design that actually does the bloody job.
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