‘One day in the middle of the twentieth century...’ begins Muriel Spark in Loitering with Intent (1981). Fleur, Spark’s alter-ego in the novel, remarks on the bundles of letters she has kept: ‘Why? They are all neatly bundled up in thin folders, tied with pink tape, 1949, 1950, 1951 and on and on.’ In these catalytic years, years that converged with the design-led ‘Festival of Britain’ (1951), Spark’s own life was punctuated by editorial stints at various publishers as she roomed around London. For a time, she wrote oratories for industrialists ‘...based on very few data… I remember one of my speeches about manager-employee relationships being particularly successful.’

This paper will suggest that The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960) parodies Spark’s experience of ‘manager-employee relations’ as the ‘human research’ of Dougal Douglas, an Arts man – a man of vision - employed by two textile manufacturers to tackle absenteeism and increase productivity in their factories. Spark and Derek Stanford solicited a preface for Tribute to Wordsworth (1950) from Herbert Read, whose treatise Art & Industry: The Principles of Industrial Design (1934) is implicated in The Ballad of Peckham Rye, and the paper will examine various ways in which twentieth century design ideology can be seen to texture Spark’s life and London novels.