From the Big Sur to the Barbican. 5 min with People will always need plates

People Will Always Need Plates is the creation of Hannah Dipper and Robin Farquhar. Launched in 2003, they use high quality, low volume batch production to create witty, thoughtful and stylish products as a direct antithesis to the current proliferation of cheap, throwaway design. In keeping with their credo that good design should be used and enjoyed, treasured and shared, they develop products that, while diverse in style and application, always retain the fundamental values of functionality and beauty.

EEP. Hi guys, let's start with an easy one. What inspires you?

HD - Awkward and asymmetric. I lean towards the hard-to-love end of art, architecture and music… and yet, paradoxically, I’d love to live in a rural idyll - but then I’d be without inspiration and start creating chintzy teasets for Etsy!

RF - I think in this increasingly throw-away world, it’s probably what always has - the desire to create beautiful, well-made products that people will cherish and keep.

EEP. If you had to choose a favourite piece of art, which one would it be?

HD - I’d choose something large and spectacular by Paolozzi - almost any bit of Paolozzi! To my great delight, in Euston one rainy morning, my then-5-year-old daughter admired Piscator on the way past… on which note, when will someone take responsibility for this magnificent piece and start to take care of it?

RF - I don’t know about favourites, they tend to change with the mood, but I remember seeing Anish Kapoor’s Adam for the first time and being blown away by the way it monkeyed with your perception of depth, space and shape. I’d love to see one of his new vantablack pieces.

EEP. Which your favourite creation? 

HD - Good old Trellick Tower on all any anything. I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on Trellick Tower in 1996 while living in beautiful Bath, and then when I moved to London, lived within sight of it for the first 5 years that I was there. It was like a homing beacon for me.

RF - The All the cars… bespoke prints are probably the most fun to create, I get to chat to fellow car nerds who are passionate about their collections or car histories. You can lose hours over the details of a Rostyle wheel or the merits of a Ghia specification.

R. If you could get on a plane tomorrow, where would you go?

HD - Mongolia. I won a travel bursary at the RCA and took the Trans-Siberian railway from Beijing to Moscow. At that time, visas were complex and the itinerary and train timetable meant that to my immense regret, I only glimpsed this vast and amazing country from a train window. But there were horsemen, and yurts erected next to dismal Soviet housing blocks, where historically, the USSR had tried to force the population into a static, non-nomadic existence. I’d like to go back properly.

RF - That would have to be Big Sur. We stopped there on our way down PCH many years ago and it was beautiful - though the whole of that trip ranks up there among

st the best.

EEP. Which is your favourite place in London

HD - Barbican. It’s possibly London's purest example of what architecture can do to a space - alas that it’s now beyond most people it somewhat contradicts the values and utopian vision of the modernists.

RF - I’m going to plump for the ICA, the scene of our first date many years ago - we went to see the Beck’s Futures exhibition.

EEP. What do you enjoy the most of being a londoner?

RF - ssshh, we're actually ex-Londoners now, but only by a few miles. The thing I miss most about being a Londoner is not being able to pop out for a really good bowl of noodles.

HD - like wot he said. What we do like is that we can still spend the morning at the V&A, and the afternoon in the middle of the Chiltern Hills with fresh air.