There is more than a touch of the Victorian inventor about Thomas Heatherwick. It is not difficult to imagine that he would find himself at ease in the company of Brunel, Paxton or Stephenson, talking over some brave enterprise or other.
Like the great Victorians, Heatherwick has managed to avoid being pigeonholed as an architectural designer, engineer or sculptor. He is all of these and more, dreaming up buildings that look like sculptures, sculptures that look like inventions, and inventions that look like artworks. More than any of his contemporaries, Heatherwick has managed to reintroduce the concept of delight back into design.
His works range from the Zip Bag for Longchamp, which doubles in size when unzipped, to his Rolling Bridge in London’s Paddington Basin, built in 2004, which curls and uncurls like an exotic steel caterpillar. Last year his Seed Cathedral seduced the Shanghai Expo, sweeping first prize for the British Pavilion. Like a vast sea anemone, it bristled with 60,000 fibre-optic rods, each holding seeds from Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank.
Now Heatherwick’s unfettered imagination has been turned to another landmark project – one that, at a cost of £11 million, carries a huge weight of expectation. The designer has been asked by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, and Transport for London to reinvent the iconic Routemaster bus in time for the Olympics.
'Our role is not to sex up the bus,’ Heatherwick, 40, explains. 'It’s about trying to make a better bus. My work is to create calmness and order out of a form of transportation that was last thought about as a whole 50 years ago.’
London boasts one of the largest bus networks in the world, with more than 700 routes. Every weekday about 6,800 buses ferry six million passengers around the capital. But Heatherwick believes that a lot of what made bus travel magical has been lost.
'We are now travelling in objects that are the result of all sorts of regulations,’ he says. 'In isolation they may make sense, but they don’t necessarily make for an environment that you would look forward to being in. In a way, buses have become second-rate to the Tube.’
The original Routemaster was revolutionary. It was developed over several years from 1947, by Albert Durrant and Colin Curtis, with the aim of producing a light, simple-to-run, fuel-efficient vehicle to replace London’s electric trolleybus fleet.
It featured power steering, comfortable suspension, a fully automatic gearbox and power-hydraulic brakes, and borrowed technical innovations from the aviation industry. The distinctive curved styling came from Douglas Scott, who also designed the interiors, with a bold colour scheme to hide nicotine stains.
The bus was rolled out by London Transport in 1956, with nearly 3,000 built over the years up to 1968. Then production stopped and cheaper modern buses, which could be operated without a conductor, were gradually brought in.
But the Routemaster wouldn’t go quietly. It survived various attempts to kill it off, though was largely phased out by 2005 (a few still remain on two heritage routes). It continues to generate great affection, and none of its replacements generated any kind of affection among Londoners. Some, including the snake-like 'bendy’ buses, have inspired full-blown animosity.
Boris Johnson, as part of his 2008 election campaign, vowed that 'on day one, act one, scene one’ of his mayoralty he would put plans in motion to bring in a new bus designed specifically for London’s streets, as the original Routemaster had been. The matter represented, he said, his 'most deeply held convictions about the future of London’.
Heatherwick’s bus is a double-decker with a difference. It has a hybrid engine that will be 40 per cent more energy-efficient than a standard bus, as well as being much quieter.
Unlike the original Routemaster, it will have three separate doorways and two staircases that should make for rapid loading and unloading, and in turn reduce delays. It will hold 87 passengers (10 more than the original), and have more space for wheelchairs and pushchairs.
There is also an updated version of the beloved rear platform, which will be open to the elements in peak times when a conductor is on board. Outside peak hours, transparent folding doors will seal the platform, allowing the bus to run safely with the driver alone.
'Standing on the rear platform of this delectable bus brings back a sense of nostalgia,’ Johnson said in November, unveiling a lifesize mock-up, 'but also demonstrates the quintessence of the latest technology and design, making the bus fit for 21st-century London.’
Part of Heatherwick’s ambition was to reintroduce a sense of connection with the outside world. There are large windows downstairs, plus dynamic 'wraparound’ glazing that follows the line of the staircases at the front and rear.
'Buildings used to have windows that opened, trains used to have windows that opened, but now more and more things are sealed and enclosed,’ he says. 'It’s all about whether you feel imposed upon by a particular mode of transport or whether you feel special in some way when you use it. Some old cars and buses manage to make you feel grand somehow, and the original Routemaster had some of that feeling.’
But he is keen to stress that the new vehicle is much more than an exercise in nostalgia.
'There is an idealism and romance to the original Routemaster buses that I share,’ he says. 'But there are things that are highly dysfunctional about it in today’s world. Our job is to reconcile a lot of factors, some of which are very different to when the Routemaster was originally conceived. It’s quite a delicate balance.’
Working closely with the manufacturers Wrightbus – which will build the buses in Ballymena, Northern Ireland – and Transport for London, Heatherwick Studio has involved itself in every aspect of the design, from the fabric on the moulded seats to the way that the tops of the seats line up with the bottom of the windows.
The aim is to have five of the new buses – at a cost of about £300,000 each – on busy central London routes by spring 2012. Transport for London hopes to have a couple of hundred of the new Routemasters in service across the capital within the next few years.
Heatherwick’s studio in King’s Cross, London, is a cavernous warehouse space, full of curiosities, models and metalwork. One wall holds a collection of 3D topographical maps; close by is a stuffed squirrel in a bell jar. There is a model of Heatherwick’s beach cafe in Littlehampton, West Sussex – made with shell-like bands of sculpted steel – and a sculpture made of a series of interlocked half-sized lampposts.
With 35 staff, the studio embraces many different disciplines, from product design and architecture to landscape design, with a team of assembled experts that include Heatherwick’s wife, the landscape architect Maisie Rowe, and associate director Fred Manson, who commissioned Tate Modern in his old job as the environment director at the London Borough of Southwark.
'One of the great things about Thomas is that he is not limited by just talking about architecture or design,’ says Kulveer Ranger, the Mayor of London’s transport adviser, who is intimately involved in the Routemaster project. 'Thomas is a very tactile designer, looking at materiality as well as the design elements, as well as creating something that is functional.’
The feeling that almost anything is possible seems to have been ingrained in Heatherwick from a very early age. As a child he worked on inventions for mechanical birthday cards and go-karts.
When asked to name his design heroes he suggests his grandmother Elisabeth Tomalin, a textile designer who escaped Nazi Germany, set up Marks & Spencer’s first textile studio in the 1940s, and collaborated with iconic figures such as the architect Ernö Goldfinger.
Heatherwick’s grandfather Miles Tomalin was equally influential. He was a writer, an inventor, a musician and a Communist who fought in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. He also worked at the Ministry of Information on the plans for the Festival of Britain, and was a great collector of model trains and Heath-Robinson cartoons.
'He was really interested in ideas and engineering and the place of invention,’ Heatherwick says. 'He had all these books from the Victorian era of invention, a time of incredible optimism. There were people spotting connections between certain things and taking extraordinarily inventive steps.
'There was a huge contrast between that world, which was so strong in his mind, and the world of the 1970s and 1980s, when I was growing up, when there seemed to be an absence of invention. It all seemed to be about fixing things from the past or tweaking styles, and it didn’t feel like real progress was being made. So the world that my grandfather was interested in played to my curiosity.’
His father is Hugh Heatherwick, a musician, and his mother is Stefany Tomalin – an artist and the former owner of the Bead Shop on Portobello Road in Notting Hill. Heatherwick suggests that he is an 'annoyingly obvious outcome’ of his parents, with a father interested in innovation and a mother with a passion for craftsmanship.
'It was quite clear in my mind that I wanted to be an inventor,’ he says. 'It embedded itself. I suppose I was quite good at drawing and so that world opened up more readily to me because I could draw out the ideas that I had. Even from a young age I wasn’t cut out for anything else.’
Heatherwick studied 3D design in Manchester, followed by the Royal College of Art, where he met Sir Terence Conran, who commissioned a laminated birch gazebo from Heatherwick for his garden.
Other early supporters included the furniture retailer Zeev Aram and Wilfred Cass, who founded the Cass Sculpture Foundation and bought a pavilion by Heatherwick. Shortly after graduating from the Royal College, Heatherwick established his own studio. One of his first high-profile projects was a window installation for Harvey Nichols that seemed to burst out from the building like an alien tentacle and wrap itself around the store.
In the years that followed, his work grew in scale. His East Beach Cafe at Littlehampton, finished in 2007, was a noteworthy treat, resembling a vast shell that had been washed up on the Sussex coast.
There was also the B of the Bang – a vast street sculpture that looked like a spiky sputnik – built to commemorate the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester. But the project ended in disaster. A 2m spike fell from the structure before it was even unveiled. Eventually deemed unsafe, the sculpture was dismantled; then Manchester City Council took Heatherwick and his contractors to court. In 2008 the council accepted an out-of-court settlement of £1.7 million. It is the only blot on Heatherwick’s copybook and hasn’t dented his enthusiasm for big sporting projects. He recently confirmed that he will be designing the flaming cauldron for next year’s Olympic Games.
It was the success of his Shanghai Seed Cathedral that brought him widespread international acclaim. The £25 million British Pavilion built on ideas Heatherwick first explored in his small Sitooterie pavilion – an other worldly hedgehog-like summerhouse – that graced Barnards Farm in Essex in 2002.
'It took off as a phenomenon more than we had ever imagined,’ Heatherwick says of Shanghai. 'We knew that there was a strong story there but we didn’t really know if it would hook. But people queued and fought to get in and it was thrilling. Eight million people went to see it. All of the Communist Party officials came, and their wives. It was great to have a hit on our hands.’
Some have campaigned for the Seed Cathedral to be resurrected in Britain, or have offered Heatherwick large sums of money to buy it. But all of this misses the point, he says: the idea was specific to Shanghai and the seeds used in the Cathedral have since been scattered to schools and colleges throughout China and beyond as part of an ongoing education project.
'The Chinese came up with the name Dandelion for the building,’ Heatherwick says. 'It sums up the idea of seeds dispersing in the wind. It was something unique, rather than something that could be sold as an artefact.’
The Seed Cathedral also turned Heatherwick into a star in China. He already has a satellite office in Hong Kong, where the studio is working on a vast shopping mall, and is now considering setting up another office on the mainland. 'The Expo was on the news in China every day,’ Heatherwick says. 'So we are now being asked to do other projects there. There is a real openness in China. In Britain developers can be much more formulaic, but in China they want to talk to you about your ideas, without just duplicating what’s been done before.’
A boyish passion comes to the surface as Heatherwick talks. He explains that he is especially interested in big public projects – housing schemes, schools, hospitals, even prisons – as well as more glamorous commissions such as museums or art galleries. 'We are starting work on housing and museum projects in China and it is a really interesting time there,’ he says. 'It reminds me of more than a century ago in Britain when there was a real optimism here, a can-do approach.
'The thing I feel in common with some of those Victorian inventors is that they weren’t just coming up with ideas to publish them. They were trying to get you to Bristol more quickly, or were dealing with how you get across the Atlantic as fast as you can. Then, in solving those problems, other things come into play, including craftsmanship and aesthetics. The thing that is really exciting for me is the reality of it.’
There is little as real or down-to-earth as the sight of a big red bus travelling through the streets of London. And it could well prove to be Heatherwick’s most visible and accessible project to date. 'My job is to reconcile complicated projects, and the bus has been a huge challenge,’ he says. 'But it’s definitely a once-in-a-lifetime chance.’