2026 Bursary Recipient: Nicola Miles
​Nicola Miles, Merryl Huxtable Award Winner for 2026, describes her project to improve the archive of Peggy Angus and resituate her within design history
This project focuses on the handprinted wallpapers of designer, artist and teacher Peggy Angus (1904-1993). It grew out of my doctoral thesis on overlooked female designers at the kit clothing company Clothkits (1968-1988). That research revealed Angus as a significant influence on Clothkits designer Janet Kennedy, Angus’s close friend and former student. This discovery led me to Angus’s extensive archive at The Keep, Brighton, comprising over 200 boxes containing tiles, wallpapers, drawings, personal papers and correspondence.
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Angus made a substantial contribution to the design of post-war British public buildings and domestic interiors through her tile designs and handprinted wallpapers. She actively engaged with the contemporary design world through her involvement in organisations such as the Council for Industrial Design and her friendships with fellow designers including Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious. Despite this, her work – particularly her wallpapers - has received surprisingly little attention within design history.
The archive documents both Angus’s design practice and her work as a collaborator and teacher, but remains difficult to use, with incomplete cataloguing and limited contextual information. This project brings together two strands of work. It focuses on developing and enhancing the archive so it can be more readily used by researchers, curators and practitioners, while also seeking to situate Angus more clearly within British design history. The project also engages with wider historiographical questions about how craft-based and domestic practices have been excluded from dominant design narratives.
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The research draws on a close reading of Angus’s archive alongside material held in other collections, allowing designs, correspondence and commissions to be traced across different collections. This archival work is complemented by oral history interviews with former printers, friends, family members and clients, helping to build a fuller picture of Angus’s working life and creative networks. Close study of her wallpapers and tiles is set within a wider understanding of post-war British design, while also identifying items within the collection that would benefit from conservation.​​
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Building on funding from the British Art Network and the Royal Historical Society, as well as institutional support from the University of Brighton Design Archives, the Wallpaper History Society bursary enables research that would otherwise be impossible. The funding supports time-sensitive oral history interviews with family members and former collaborators, access to the private family archive in Shetland, and a research visit to Cambridge to consult correspondence at Newnham College and study a rare surviving wallpaper in situ at Girton College Old Library. For me, this bursary represents an opportunity to give voice to a designer who deserves recognition alongside her better-known contemporaries and to contribute to the recovery of women designers whose work significantly shaped modern visual culture.
Nicola Miles
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