The British modernist architect Maxwell Fry designed this wastepaper bin around the time of the Second World War, while he was a town planning advisor in West Africa. Fry was one of the first architects in Britain to adopt modernist design principles and is best known for his pre-War public housing schemes in London. In Africa, he and his wife Jane Drew (also an architect) adapted the clean lines of European modernism for a tropical climate, incorporating local materials and traditional elements such as decorative pierced screen walls to give shade. Perhaps these screens also inspired the simple pierced decoration of this wooden wastepaper bin that Fry designed for his own use while in Ghana, and later brought back to England.