Top Gear

Having a house full of boys means that Top Gear is on quite a lot. Secretly I really quite enjoy all the sillyness and jolly japery which makes the otherwise rather tedious subject of cars rather fun. But even so I found it difficult to take quite seriously the assertion that the Range Rover has an 'inspirational shape' which I saw in today's paper in the obituary of Spen King (B 1939.1). Together with a colleague, Gordon Bashford, King was responsible for the Range Rover and, after being in charge of Triumph after it was swallowed by British Leyland, King oversaw the concepts of the Metro and the Maestro. They are gone (my first car was a Maestro), but the Range Rover is very much around. On the last day of term they were all over Haileybury like a rash as luggage was packed into the cavernous air conditioned voids of their boots. Good design is not noticeable. Whether it be Routemaster busses or Gilbert Scott phone boxes or Perpendicular windows in Mediaeval wool churches, a good design is the sort of thing we only notice when it is not there. Maybe we will miss the Range Rovers when they are gone.