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.
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.
“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.
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.
An S-Stock moquette created by Paul’s team during Covid features diamond shapes created out of thin diagonals in the sub-surface line colours; there’s a delicacy about it, suggesting cobwebs. These ‘lost moquettes’ represent an alternative reality, not only for trains and buses, but also for Londoners themselves. Moquette is, to use an obvious metaphor, part of the fabric of our lives, as familiar to some as the cover of their sofa; like any aesthetic object, it affects mood.
Someone who would have found in the blue-green and orange colourway of the moquette designed by Pat Barrow for the Victoria line in the late 1980s a beauty absent from the mainly red and blue one that got the nod might have said ‘yes’ rather than ‘no’ to the marriage proposal they received on a Vic line train. But Barrow’s Vic line moquette languishes in the ‘lost’ cupboard, along with a green, black and orange one Barrow did for the District at the same time.
A certain type of person, rooting about inside this cupboard, will prefer all these rejects to the ones used. We all know the type (I think I’m one myself): melancholics, forever brooding over the path not taken.
Seats of London: A Field Guide to London Transport Moquette Patterns by Andrew Martin, published by Safe Haven
All images: Safe Haven Books.
