The designer Clive Bacon, who designed the chair while still a student at the Royal College of Art previously trained at the Beckenham College of Art and the Ravensbourne College of Art. He made his first piece of furniture, a bookcase, in the garden shed at home. Bacon's ingenious jigsaw design enables the chairs to be connected together and stacked for easy storage. The chair was produced as a result of a design project initiated by Professor R. D. Russell at the Royal College of Art.

Design Furniture Contracts Ltd was formed in September 1961 as an associated company of Design Furniture Ltd, to deal with the increasing volume of special contract work and expand this particular side of the business. It was felt that the linking/stacking chair was particularly suitable as the first standard design in its range of modern contract furniture and the chair was produced for the halls of several colleges, among them the Loughborough College of Technology.

The new Bury Unitarian Church was designed and constructed by local architect James T Ratcliffe and opened in 1973. Ratcliffe chose Bacon's chairs to seat a congregation of 140 people.