“ Tom Dixon has worked his way through two recessions, having started out making his own furniture in the early 1980s. ‘The conditions in which we worked meant we had to be enterprising,’ he recalls. ‘We got our materials cheap – if not free. Retrospectively, it was recession chic, if you like. Ron Arad, Jasper Morrison and I each had very different outputs but we were all fashioned by the understanding that we had to know how to make things with our own hands.’