British Design 1948-2012, at the V&A, Seven magazine review One day, it was to be hoped, all of Britain would be united in joyful contemplation - and inhabitation - of such modern structures. Some of the festival's street furniture, such as Ernest Race's so-called "Antelope" bench, has actually survived in object form. Created from lightweight steel, painted in comfortingly soft shades of pastel, such objects now have the melancholy air of archaeological fragments - relics of an optimism destined to falter if not altogether fail. As Dylan Thomas wrote at the time, with prescient irony, "what a lot of pink - rose, raspberry, strawberry, peach, flesh, blush, lobster... plastered and doodled over this four-acre gay and soon-to-be-gone Festival City in sprawling London." British Design 1948-2012 is a whistle-stop tour of styles, images and objects. The Fifties, Festival of Britain apart, is predominantly embodied as an era of anorexically slender furniture, anxiously attenuated sculpture and grimly monochrome product design. The Sixties is epitomised by the Jaguar E-type, the Mini, the miniskirt and Biba clothes. The Seventies veers between the space-age technological prowess of Concorde and the countercultural blast of punk. The Eighties is new wave music, Factory Records and a small-scale recreation of Manchester's Haçienda nightclub. The Nineties is something of a rehab unit, complete with elements salvaged from Damien Hirst's restaurant-cum-art installation Pharmacy. The Noughties is all about London as a multicultural hub of global design - a breeding ground for the fertile imaginations of dress designers such as Hussein Chalayan or electrical engineering boffins like Moritz Waldemeyer. Despite its compendious character, this thoughtfully curated show is more than a mere anthology. The exhibition's subtitle is "Innovation in the Modern Age," but one of its central themes is the deep-seated fear of innovation that has shaped and distorted so much British design since the Second World War. There are hints of this at the start, in the deeply conservative mural contributed by John Piper to the Homes and Gardens Pavilion of the Festival of Britain. This paean to traditional forms of English architecture, from cathedral and stately home to terraced house, is an eloquent testimony to the national distrust of Modernism. David Bowie is a presiding deity of the central section of the V&A's exhibition, which, under the rubric of "Subversion," examines the many ways in which cutting-edge design has tended to go underground in this country. What a contrast this makes with, for example, Germany, where the most famous instances of modern design - from VW cars to Braun shavers - are utterly mainstream products which most Germans use and enjoy with pride, not to say complacency. The truth is that Modernist design for all, in the broadest sense, has only rarely occupied centre stage in modern British life. The classic case is Modernist architecture: something that has either been unsatisfactorily imposed on people's lives, - witness the disastrous social housing of the Sixties - or grafted into the urban landscape by big business. The best place from which to ponder the larger lessons of the V&A's show is not, perhaps, the V&A itself, but a place several miles north: the natural viewing platform that is the summit of Parliament Hill. From here, London is a panorama. The silhouette of St Paul's has been all but lost against the looming pyramid of The Shard. To the east, the view is now dominated by the gargantuan twisted helter-skelter of Anish Kapoor's ArcelorMittal Orbit. Between them, these two structures amount to the very latest chapter in the history of modern British design. Each, in its own way, is an unequivocal monument to the naked power of Mammon. Sixty years on, the Festival of Britain's utopian civic dream seems every bit as remote as its vanished architecture. To Aug 12; www.vam.ac.uk This review also appeared in SEVEN magazine, free with Sunday Telegraph