[5] The family moved to Wembley, north London at the outbreak of the second world war, where his father was a bomb disposal officer.

[5][6][7] After a brief job as a scene painter with the BBC at their Alexandra Palace TV studios, Grange was called up for National Service and between 1948 and 1949 was posted in the Royal Engineers as a technical illustrator making drawings for military equipment instruction manuals.

[6][8] In 1951, Grange took part in the Festival of Britain, while working for Gordon and Ursula Bowyer on the Sports Pavilion for the South Bank exhibition.

[10] Then in 1972, Grange, along with Alan Fletcher, Colin Forbes, Theo Crosby and Mervyn Kurlansky, was a founding partner in Pentagram, an interdisciplinary design consultancy.

These designs included kettles and food mixers for Kenwood, razors for Wilkinson Sword, cameras for Kodak, typewriters for Imperial, clothes irons for Morphy Richards, cigarette lighters for Ronson, washing machines for Bendix, pens for Parker, Adshel bus shelters, Reuters computers, and regional Royal Mail postboxes.

[11]In 1968, Grange was responsible for the interior layout and exterior shaping of the cab and nose cone of British Rail's new High Speed Train (HST), the InterCity 125.

This work included door handles for izé,[16] desk and floor lamps for Anglepoise,[17] and a chair for the elderly for Hitch Mylius.

[30][31][32][33][34][35] A new book on his life and work, entitled ‘Kenneth Grange: Designing the Modern World’, was published in 2024 by Thames & Hudson[36] with Sir Jonathan Ive providing the foreword, stating that his favourite design was the Inter-City 125 train: "I remember taking a day return from London to Bath solely to ride on his train.

“...For his services to humility, for his love of making and his enormous impact on the visual culture, Sir Kenneth Grange is a hero of mine and of British design.

Grange was the Honorary President of the 125 Group which aims to preserve operational examples of the subsequent production HST vehicles.

[44] The very first HST, number 43002, was renamed as "Sir Kenneth Grange" in 2016 and was subsequently given to the National Railway Museum Collection in York, in September 2019 after withdrawal from service and went on permanent display in the Great Hall.

[5] Talking to Kirsty Young on BBC's Desert Island Discs, on 1 January 2017, he chose his luxury item to be a trombone, and his book to be Bauhaus by Hans Maria Wingler [de].