The Spitfire has made it into the final three of Britain's greatest design icons.
Britain's three favourite homegrown designs since 1900 were announced yesterday as the London Underground map, the Supermarine Spitfire and Concorde.
The Design Museum and The Culture Show asked the public to choose their favourites from 25 design icons.
The selection included the Routemaster London bus, the K2 telephone kiosk, the Mini, the red telephone kiosk and more modern inventions such as the World Wide Web and the Tomb Raider video game.
The winning design will be unveiled on the BBC2 show on March 16 following a public vote.
The Spitfire, manufactured in Birmingham during the Second World War, was designed by Staffordshire-born Reginald Mitchell in 1934 when the RAF wanted a replacement for the Bristol Bulldog fighter plane.
The nomination comes just three days before the 70th anniversary of the first flight of a Spitfire at Duxford Aerodrome in Cambridgeshire.
The London Underground map was designed by Harry Beck in 1931 after the Tube grew too large to squeeze the new lines and stations into a geographical map.
Beck based his map on an electrical circuit, representing each line in a different colour and interchange stations as diamonds. The crowded central area was enlarged and the course of each route simplified into a straight line.
Concorde, the most modern design on the shortlist, was created in 1969 to 1976 by the British Aerospace Corporation with Aerospatiale.
Concorde 001 completed its first flight from Toulouse on March 2, 1969.
The sleek triangular wings enabled the aircraft, now defunct, to fly at exceptionally high speed, but required it to take off and land at such steep angles that its needle-shaped nose was tilted for the pilots to see the runway.
