There’s a video of a bus doing press-ups that’s in the top of the Most Watched/Listed to chart on the BBC Website. It was also on various News programmes over the last few days.
You might have seen it.
They’re calling it a London bus, but its ‘ODL 15’ number plate shows that is not correct. Before it was a ‘work of art’ it was a bus serving the Isle of Wight, known as Southern Vectis 555.
Sharp-eyed reader
Many thanks to VB reader Ed Earnshaw who first brought it to our attention (thanks to the others who have contacted us since then too).
The London Boster, as it’s called, was created by Artist David Cerny and now sits outside the Business Design Centre in London’s Islington.
Ed gave us some of the details, but via the fantastic people at the Isle of Wight Bus Museum we contacted Richard Newman, a man with an amazing encyclopaedic knowledge of the buses that have run on the Island.
Lived on the Island
The 60-seater ‘ODL 15’ entered service in 1958 driving the roads of the Island (photo right of it at Blackgang in 1976), with its only blemish being involved in what was described to us as a ‘bad accident’ in Yarmouth. It continued its service until it was withdrawn twenty years later in June 1978.
Stored in Ryde over the Winter, it was then shipped to Vuren in Holland where it was used as a static advertising board.
For the hardcore bus enthusiast, it’s a Bristol Lodekkas, built in Brislington, near Bristol
Similar one at Newport Bus Museum
If you want to see a similar bus, the Bus Museum have one that you can see – minus the lifting arms and red paint – in Newport.
Image: © Used with the kind permission of grahamwalker007
