Telegraph writers and editors have chosen the most notable Britons of 2010 - not necessarily the highest achiving, nor the most admired, but the people who left an indelible stamp on the year. Today, we profile 12; tomorrow our top 10, including our Briton of the Year.
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Ann Widdecombe
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Phoebe Philo
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Christopher Bailey
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Chris Evans
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Zaha Hadid
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David de Rothschild
8:42AM GMT 28 Dec 2010
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Chris Evans
When Chris Evans was announced as the successor to the adored Terry Wogan on the Radio 2 breakfast show, many critics assumed he would fail. A few weeks after Evans began the job, then vanished for a curiously early “holiday”, they assumed they’d been right. His listening figures, they loudly predicted, would be nothing like Wogan’s. In the event, this proved to be true: Evans’s figures were much higher (9.5 million versus 8.1 million). After a start that Evans himself admitted was unconvincing (“I was so nervous I couldn’t remember my own name, let alone anything amusing to say”), he had settled into a groove that was genial and gently mischievous, a world away from his belligerent laddishness of the 1990s.
Pete Cashmore
Described as “the Brad Pitt of the Blogosphere”, this 25-year-old Scot with matinee idol looks runs one of the world’s fastest growing companies: Mashable. Never heard of it? You obviously haven’t spent much time on the internet. Mashable is a blog, originally started from his bedroom, which rounds up the most interesting developments and news on the internet, and is popular with both geeks and with those taking their first steps into the world of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. It is Twitter, in particular, that has made Cashmore a superstar. He has 2.15 million followers on the micro-blogging site, making him Britain’s most popular Tweeter, eclipsing Stephen Fry, Lily Allen and other celebrities. While their 140-character messages are often inanities, Cashmore’s simple and reliable updates have become a daily necessity for millions.
David de Rothschild
Explorer-with-a-difference, David de Rothschild crossed the Pacific in a catamaran made of plastic bottles to draw attention to pollution by the material, which, it is estimated, kills at least a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals and turtles each year. The 31-year-old scion of the banking family and nine companions made the 8,000-mile journey in 128 days after he was inspired by a report on the state of the oceans by the United Nations Environment Programme. Some 12,500 plastic bottles went to make up the sailing boat, with a mast made of a reclaimed aluminium irrigation pipe, and electronic navigation equipment powered by solar panels, windmills, turbines towed behind it in the sea and even a “bicycle generator”. He plans to start “Plasitiki Pod” programmes on the ecological issues affecting the islands – such as in Kiribati, Western Samoa and the New Hebrides – visited on the voyage.
David Nicholls
David Nicholls’s novel One Day has been the word-of-mouth hit of 2010. Since its release in the summer of last year, the book – which follows the tangled romance of Emma and Dexter, who meet every year on July 15 to compare their lives’ divergent paths – has been passed round offices, taken up by book clubs and recommended online (nearly 300 five-star Amazon ratings). It sold 50,000 in hardback and when it came out in paperback early this year sold 30,000 copies a week. Forty-four year old Nicholls, who works in the unpretentious yet smart mould of Nick Hornby and Jonathan Coe, has managed to pull at the heartstrings of British readers – both male and female. One Day is set for further success next year, when the film version starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess is released. So if 2010 was the year David Nicholls broke through, expect him to be even more famous this time next year.
Phoebe Philo
This has most definitely been Phoebe Philo’s year. First, the young British designer and mother of two changed the shape of global fashion with her second and third “clean and lean” collections for the French house of Céline, which consolidated the rise of the New Minimalism. Then, she was awarded the title Designer of the Year at the British Fashion Awards, and, wearing a super-chic black, strapless all-in-one, accepted her trophy from Bianca Jagger. “I wanted something that felt honest, that was a mixture of what I want to wear and how I want to live,” Philo has said of her vision for Céline. “I felt it needed to be quite simple and very real.” The fashion world has needed little persuading.
Graeme Swann
Success has not come easy for Graeme Swann, whose cricketing triumphs in 2010 are a tribute to his personal character and fortitude. First chosen for England 11 years ago, he blew his chance and gained a reputation for tomfoolery and a bad attitude. Returning to the county game, it took a decade of hard graft to win the favour of the England selectors once again. But when he did so, he grabbed his chance and over the last 18 months he has been the finest off spinner in Test cricket. Shane Warne describes Swann as “the most improved cricketer in the world”. Whatever the outcome of the Fourth Test in Melbourne, and indeed the Ashes series, Graeme Swann has enjoyed a fantastic year.
Zaha Hadid
The Baghdad-born, British-based architect has for years been better feted abroad than at home, but that changed when she was given this year’s RIBA Stirling Prize, the most prestigious architecture award in the UK. Hadid, who had been shortlisted three times before, won for her MAXXI Museum of 21st Century Art in Rome – “a mature piece of architecture, the distillation of years of experimentation, only a fraction of which ever got built”, the judges remarked. Noting her previous near-misses, Hadid said in her Stirling acceptance speech: “People ask me why I stay here in Britain and I tell them it is because of the Architectural Association, the great engineers, the amazing people and London – it is a fantastic city.” The capital will see evidence of that affection in Hadid’s swimming and diving centre for the 2012 Olympics
Lord Judge
Lord Judge, the Lord Chief Justice and head of the judiciary in England and Wales, continues to pepper his rulings and utterances with the sort of common sense observations that the public had begun to despair of ever hearing again from the senior judiciary. He assumed office in 2008 with a reputation for being more of a traditionalist than his recent predecessors and less keen on modernisation and reform. He he has tended to concentrate on matters that most affect the people who are the victims of crime: the general public. Recently, Lord Judge, 68, was critical of the amount of new criminal justice legislation introduced in recent years, though there are hopes that the pace will slow markedly under the Coalition. In April, he complained that courts were basing too many of their decisions on European human rights legislation, rather than centuries-old English common law. He is doing much to help restore public trust in the judiciary.
Christopher Bailey
Not only has Burberry’s share price almost doubled over 2010, but the label’s chief creative director, Christopher Bailey, has blazed a trail online. Luxury goods do not necessarily fit in with the “online space”, mainly because shoppers want the experience of a physical store. However, Mr Bailey has used the web to create a global buzz about Burberry. This year Burberry beamed its London Fashion Week show live to VIP parties in 25 of its overseas stores, from Mumbai to Beverley Hills. Attendees could browse the collection on iPads, or download the songs from a Bailey-curated compilation on iTunes. Burberry’s Art of the Trench social network website continues to grow, and next year it will launch an online “design-your-own” trenchcoat service. The West Yorkshireman – the son of a carpenter and a window dresser for M&S – has the golden touch.
Christopher Hitchens
A diagnosis of oesophagal cancer has done nothing to blunt the dazzling verbal talents and formidable insight of one of Britain’s finest writers, albeit one lost long ago to America’s shores. In a series of articles and interviews, he approached his illness with the same verve, elan and humour that has marked his career, and found the time for a vigorous, sell-out debate about religion with Tony Blair. He has shown an illuminating courage and dignity in the face of adversity – and the debilitations of chemotherapy – that may give succour to fellow sufferers everywhere. The dedicated atheist accepted with good grace the prayers of the devout for his well being, while noting that many were praying for his salvation as well as his recovery. “Please do not trouble deaf heaven with your bootless cries,” he wrote in Vanity Fair. “Unless, of course, it makes you feel better.”
Ann Widdecombe
A prediction made in January that Ann Widdecombe would appear on our television screens in a sequinned frock, being swung around a dancefloor by Anton Du Beke, would probably have been met with incredulity. But the former MP for Maidstone and the Weald was a surprise star of 2010, making it all the way to the quarter finals of Strictly Come Dancing, despite referring to herself as a “dancing elephant”. The woman who once said Michael Howard had something of the night about him proved herself to be a dark horse, with her refusal to take herself too seriously enamouring her to a public who previously knew her as a strict Catholic and Conservative.
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