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Leytonstone's slightly unloved bus sculpture contains a secret.
My long-standing interest in this sculpture comes from the fact that I have a personal connection - it was created by Lodewyk Pretor. Lodevyk - a South African - taught at Epping Forest College, where he met my dad, who was a woodwork technician.
So as anyone familiar with the area will know, Leytonstone is sliced in half by the horrific M11 Link Road - a source of huge controversy and protest through the 90s
If you don't know about the protests, do read this - they were astonishing
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M11_link_road_protest
If you don't know about the protests, do read this - they were astonishing
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M11_link_road_protest
Sadly, of course, the road was built - though it's often said that the protest helped kill off road building in Britain for a generation.
By the late 90s there was some money sloshing around to try and improve the public realm, and a competition was launched for an artwork at Leytonstone station - a competition won by Lodewyk Pretor's entry - 'Time Terminus'.
Personally I quite like Time Terminus for what it is - an unusual, slightly dumb statue of buses at a bus station. I like the fact that you can sit on it! Not enough artwork actually interacts with its environment.
The secret? Hidden inside the sculpture - and no-one knew this at the time - are a roll of wallpaper and a kitchen sink from one of the demolished houses. Squirrelled away inside a sculpture commissioned to make up for the Link Road, items from the community it destroyed live on.
It feels to me so incredibly, brilliantly subversive that it stands as a permanent monument to what happened in east London over those years, and that it did so for so long in secret.
More information on the piece can be found here https://vads.ac.uk/large.php?uid=69506&sos=0
More information on the piece can be found here https://vads.ac.uk/large.php?uid=69506&sos=0
