GoKawiilAndrew Martin
The TfL Cupboard Filled With Lost Tube Moquettes
In an extract from the new, expanded edition of his wonderful book, Seats of London: A Field Guide to London Transport Moquette Patterns, Andrew Martin opens up a very special cupboard that any transport geek would love to glimpse inside.
Where moquette that hasn't made the cut goes to live out its days.
On the eighth floor of TfL's offices in Stratford is a metal-doored cupboard, of the kind you'd expect to be stuffed with old ring binders. But this one is full of moquette.
Each sample is about the size of a towel, and most were stowed away here soon after being delivered from the weaver. These are the lost moquettes: never applied to a train or sat on by a single bottom even for the shortest hop between Covent Garden and Leicester Square.
"TfL's design team habitually refer to their 'colour blanket': a long, multicoloured strip that is a sort of moquette equivalent of a Pantone swatch."
"Moquette is so weird," says TfL's Paul Marchant. "You can't make a decision about it until it's been manufactured." Back in the 1930s even being one of Britain's greatest 20th century artists was no guarantee of seeing a whole train upholstered with the moquette you'd been commissioned to design. Neither of Paul Nash's two patterns made the cut; one never made it past a sketch. The main reason is that woven colours can come out very different from the CMYK shades selected and viewed on a backlit computer screen. It's why TfL's design team habitually refer to their 'colour blanket': a long, multicoloured strip that is a sort of moquette equivalent of a Pantone swatch. (It would also make an eye-catching — though rather pendulous — scarf.) Several 'design routes' and colourways are woven, and sometimes one just doesn't come off. On my visit a variant of the new Metropolitan line moquette being developed had just arrived from Camira. You could get away with its rhubarb-and-custard effect on an MCC tie; not as something to stare at all the way home to Amersham.
Poplar, a variant of the new DLR moquette.
In the cupboard there's a variant of Poplar, the new DLR moquette, with a slightly more literal representation of the local architecture. A moquette from the Barber Osgerby design studio for the Elizabeth line has the same dense horizontal stripes as that selected, but warmer tones (orange, green, brown) and — above all — no royal purple.
... continue reading