What is (in) a livery?
Chronologically, this collection of coach liveries begins around 20 years ago when my primary school would take us each week on a Johnson’s coach to Tudor Grange Leisure Centre, so that those of us who lived so far from any natural body of water could learn how to swim. These coach journeys were a regular reorientation of the social life of the playground, leading to the alien world of the wet so unfamiliar to the life of the West Midlands. In their strangeness, and as a carrier to the sensorial overwhelm of the pool changing rooms, these coach journeys remain vivid in my mind amongst the general haze of childhood memories; in fact, some of my most ancient neuroses come from these journeys. Coaches are a peculiar form of sociality, privately booked to transport a public brought together by a shared destination or interest, these private-public worlds carry a nostalgic harkening backwards, to the school trip or package holiday. How and why do these nostalgic attachments become manifest in the coach?
Aesthetically, the foundations were laid by Allied Carpets in Solihull Retail Park which would become Carpetright, the logo of which has become something of an aesthetic triangulation point around which I have oriented myself towards advertisement and design throughout my life. This foundation was dug up and re-presented to me on encountering the Carpetright logo in the Abbey Retail Park in Leeds, so starkly of the brand of nostalgia summed up by the phrase “well you don’t see that every day”. Blue-green turquoise cut through by a blaze of orange-red fonts(!) felt like an irruption of a sentimentality long since subdued by the current trend towards a shameful and gauche tastefulness; exemplified by Carpetright’s current, cohesive logo that merits no attention. I have played with the phrase “Carpetright design” as an attempt at conjoining both this earlier sentimentality, and its subsequent scrubbing out by embarrassed designers. What sentiments and affects might Carpetright design’s disturbing presence in and amongst the timidly smooth dominance of contemporary aesthetics bring up for us as we navigate the exhausted cities of the 2020s?
Etymologically, a livery refers to a provision to a servant and has become, by way of the servant’s uniform, attached to the design of vehicles that identify that specific vehicle with a particular business. Coming from the French verb livrer which means to deliver, a livery is simply what is given – what is provided. Provisionally, coach liveries serve as an aesthetic vehicle for a waning design ethos that can still be found (and may one day wax back into dominance) in less mobile places. Personal, stationary reminders include: Dad’s Lane Fish Bar and Restaurant in Stirchley, McClary Self Service Laundrette & Dry Cleaners in Burley, St John’s Way in Knowle, the Carpetright in Kirkstall, and the old Morrison’s logo that could still be seen on the side of the Newlands location as recently as 2023. While it was the mundane reappearance of Carpetright’s logo in my life in Leeds that set off the chain of nostalgic associations mourning what has been lost, it is coach liveries that deliver me back into the sentimental as their personalities slide past me on Hampden match days, in Ayrshire seaside locales, and the motorways that choke the cities I love. These are not chance encounters, but constant, mobile reminders of the tenets and consequences of Carpetright design.
Coach liveries are a diffusion of Carpetright design, a dispersal that follows the function these vehicles fulfil in transport networks and the localised nature of coach ownership. There is much more that could be said about the interaction of these two qualities and the designs of these liveries, but I do not want to do that. Nor do I want to provide any kind of definition of Carpetright design. Instead, what follows is a compilation of screenshots of coach liveries I have stumbled across in my foolish wanderings as of late. Coach liveries feel like personalities in a world where the personal is increasingly suspicious. Hopefully this collection serves to outline the tension inherent to Carpetright design, as well as to deeper questions of why it exists where it exists, and what conditions are necessary for its continued perseverance of against the smooth.