Ray Lewis, a council spokesman, said: "They are banging the drum about polluting the environment, but it's small fry. Their intervention is perplexing.''Craig Bennett of Friends of the Earth described the chalk horse as "more like a Trojan horse'' and said that if the project proceeded it would make it easier for the Government to rubber-stamp bigger schemes such as roads, ports and airports. "It is very important that people understand that this chips away at wildlife legislation," he said.. Jonathan Ive, the Briton whose design career started with washbasins in Essex but who now works in California shaping Apple products such as the iMac computer and the iPod music player, won the inaugural Designer of the Year award last night.

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Mr Ive, 36, who has been the vice-president of industrial design at Apple since 1998, received the prizeafter flying in from California, where he works at Apple's head office in Cupertino."Jonathan's designs have touched millions of people's lives and transformed the workplace," said the fashion designer Sir Paul Smith, who was on the judging panel.In the past year Apple has released new versions of the iMac, iPod and two versions of its PowerBook notebook computers, all designed by Mr Ive's team.

He is a softly spoken man who gives interviews only rarely, and even less often reveals his opinions of other peoples' work. But in an exclusive interview with The Independent last year, he noted that those who mimicked his work were never successful. He said he was unimpressed by those who use, "swoopy shapes to look good, stuff that is so aggressively designed, just to catch the eye". He said: "I think that's arrogance, it's not done for the benefit of the user."Mr Ive's designs have for years ensured that Apple's products - which are found in fewer than 5 per cent of workplaces and homes - attract far more attention than rivals in the computing field.The other designers nominated for the prize, sponsored by MFI, were Solange Azagury-Partridge, creative director of the Parisian jeweller Boucheron; Tord Boontje, a Dutch-born designer of glassware, lighting and furniture; and Rockstar Games, which developed the "Grand Theft Auto" video game series.The winners were chosen by a combination of more than 20,000 votes from the public at the Design Museum's website, along with the votes of a four-strong jury Mr Ive won both the public and the jury vote. His rise within Apple, where he had worked since 1992, followed the return in 1997 of Steve Jobs, its charismatic founder who is known to some as a design obsessive.

At his previous company he is reported to have spent an afternoon choosing between 15 shades of black for a computer.When Mr Ive stepped up, Apple's designs were the same as other computer companies', consisting of the cheap plastic "beige boxes". Mr Ive first developed the radical, curved shape of the all-in-one iMac computer, and then had to consult sweet manufacturers to find out how to make the plastic casing both blue and transparent - the other innovation in his design.The iMac was a huge hit among consumers and helped make Apple profitable for the first time in years. Since then he has lent his unique style to two generations of the iMac computer and the iPod MP3 player, as well as the company's eye-catching titanium notebook computers. The newest version of the iMac has been described by some as "the iMac for the anglepoise generation" but Mr Ive said that it was inspired by the shape of the sunflower.Born in London, Mr Ive studied design and art at Newcastle Polytechnic (now North- umbria University). In 1989 he became a partner at Tangerine, a London-based design consultancy where he worked on a range of products ranging from power tools to washbasins.The added ingredient: EleganceBy Charles Arthur Seen from a great height, Apple's products are specks in the huge world of computing - a few in every hundred.

Yet in design terms, they're an oasis in a vast desert.Touch most PCs and you'll feel a certain give, an uncertainty in assembly that is the curse of being one of the slaves to Microsoft's hegemony, built down to a price to run identical software. Even where it doesn't show physically, you can sense a missing ingredient - elegance.Jonathan Ive is admired among designers because he pours elegance into products. The 1997 iMac was a gumdrop-inspired solution to making an all-in-one machine. The second, with its movable flat screen, alludes to a sunflower. The iPod is like an everlasting cigarette packet for those addicted to music instead of tobacco.Rivals make comparable, even cheaper, products But they don't have it They don't look desirable.