Blur – Modern Life Is Rubbish album art

In 1993, London design studio Stylorouge perfectly encapsulated the Anglocentric, nostalgic tone of the burgeoning “Britpop” movement with their design for Blur’s second album Modern Life Is Rubbish. The type used here is Festival Titling, created by Phillip Boydell (1896–1984) for Monotype as the official display face for the 1951 Festival of Britain — an astute choice to suggest that a large part of Britpop’s not-so-subtle rhetoric included a sense of longing for the glory days of the British Empire (the cover for Blur’s single “For Tomorrow”, released a few weeks before the album and also designed by Stylorouge, showed two WWII Spitfire fighter aircrafts in full “Battle of Britain” mode).

The painting here, by artist Paul Gribble, depicts the iconic 1937 Mallard steam engine, whose original brass nameplate was fittingly lettered in all-caps Gill Sans. A proud symbol of British industrial power and ingenuity, today the Mallard is on display at the National Railway Museum in York.