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It's hard to imagine anything more at odds with the hi-tech, microwave, designer-kitchen age than the Aga cooker. It's formidably heavy. It's far from cheap to buy and install. And yet its popularity has grown and grown since it came to England from Sweden in 1929. More than just a commercial success story, it has come to symbolise the quintessence of upper-and middle-class rural life. In Chiswick and the Isle of Dogs it suggests the warm heart of the English country home. How did it happen?

Coca-Cola started out as a syrup into which you squirted carbonated water. The bottle designed to contain the resulting fizzy drink became one of the most famous pieces of packaging in the world. It was designed in 1916 as a result of a competition. Despite changes of flavour, the introduction of cans and relentless global competition from rivals, the heavy glass bottle with the archaic-looking trademark still symbolises the American dream. Accordingly it inspires approval or hostility - depending on taste.

Hitler called it the 'strength through joy' car and he meant it to be one of the engineering triumphs of the Third Reich. But it was the British Army who put it into production after the war. Rootes and Ford turned the car down; they didn't think it had a future. Twenty million Beetles later, it's still being produced - in Mexico. How did the noisy, heavy, distinctly odd-looking motor car, with its roots in a Nazi past, become regarded as lovable, a family friend - the sort of car Walt Disney made films about - so that it really did become a 'people's car'?