Donald L Hadden

Hadden was a senior designer for Geo M Hammer, designers and retailers of school and ecclesiastical furniture. Their lift-top school desks are particularly well regarded, and always carried their brass name plate. Hammer were renowned for their interior woodwork, they were commissioned to undertake the choir stalls in Sir Basil Spence’s ground-breaking Coventry Cathedral. Dick Russell (brother of Gordon Russell and who worked for his brother before World War Two) famously designed the chairs to be used by the congregation; as all-wood stacking chairs they were innovative at the time. As senior designer, Hadden was at the heart of the Coventry project.