For anyone who grew up with postwar British furniture and textiles, their new status as highly prized design icons may be rather astonishing. But those sputnik-leg chairs, amoeba-shaped tables and atom-inspired fabric designs were burned into the collective consciousness of the baby boomers at an early age. It’s only natural that, decades later, they would surround themselves with the same, familiar items, sparking a renaissance in work by designers such as Lucienne and Robin Day, ­Dorothy Carr and Sir Terence Conran that is now embraced even by younger generations.

“Postwar British designs have been overlooked in the rush to buy American, Scandinavian, Japanese and European mid-century designs but we’ve started to see a significant shift in the past three years,” says Simon Alderson of London furniture store Twentytwentyone and curator of a new exhibition on British modernism at Circa, a vintage design show scheduled for this weekend. “People are re-evaluating the designs because, academically and technologically, they are very interesting. Their value lies in experimentation with materials and that element of British eccentricity that you don’t find in Scandinavian modernism. And it’s the era that produced the world’s bestselling chair – Robin Day’s Polyprop.”