Art & Design

Yesterday, on my way back south from the north, I decided to divert via Victoria. There I waited for the illusive Wrightbus LT-class NBfL “Borismaster”, only to find it didn’t arrive. Instead, the only London-specific vehicles I saw were an original RM and a group of three people using Boris’s Barclay’s Bike hire, the modern equivalent of the white bicycle.

I was, however, rewarded for my patience when the second timetabled departure ran as planned. This was the first time I’d seen NB4L in the flesh. My thoughts? They still remain the same. Frontally, the design was challenging and certainly struggles with the concept of a modern icon, though I did admire the Alexander J-type roofline rather a lot. I think that the designer tried too hard to make a frontal statement and it looked a little more TV Century 21 than 21st century (older readers may get the analogy).

To the off-side, the glazed staircase was an interesting, eye-catching though immodest feature (especially in hot weather, if you get my drift). The rear actually had an elegance about it but there still might be too much metal in that dome but then again, this does need to house the second stairwell. And it didn’t help that it emitted a constant sound pitch akin to a Deltic engine* on steroids, coming from either the hybrid itself or the air conditioning operating at full tilt in the heat.

So, the only bus in Britain whose rear is better than its front, perhaps?

But, inside, well, that was different. There were little touches that marked it out as a piece of decent industrial design, like the seat pattern, the front, rear and stairs grooved flooring and the “proper”, curved stairwells.

The LT class doesn’t have a monopoly on interesting or even good design. But is it “beautiful”—and is this a label you can add to a bus, anyway? It’s certainly difficult to define beauty in industrial design, as it’s a very complicated and subjective thought. It’s something you know when you see it. I’m not sure I quite recognise it as such in the LT class. But there’s certainly something about it that marks it out as different, perhaps from the inside out, perhaps from the rear.

May be, leaving aside the issues of whether an open platform is a Good Thing, it’s because the design is a very practical one. Ultimately, industrial design is a part of selling products. If it blends functionality and form, it will sell, or so design economics would have you believe. The strange thing in London, unlike the rest of the country, is that there’s no commercial market to please and therefore, in London, no one actually needs to like the LT design for it to be a success. Other than the mayor, of course.

*—the noisy Deltic engines were used in British Railways Board Class 66s 55s of the mid-1960s, called railway locomotives. Locomotives were vehicles that were once coupled ahead of a train of cars, coaches or carriages used to pull the them. They were popular before the era of unit trains : )