A year ago we were driving through the country lanes near my partner’s mum’s house and speeding past in the other direction was a series of vintage Citroëns. For a moment it felt like we’d fallen into a French New Wave film, although I looked in vain for Alain Delon or Anna Karina. Oh yeah, they have a Citroën Car Club up at the rec said Adam. There was a 2CV rattling past like a tin of spares carelesly bolted together, and the corporate glamour of a 1970s CX cruising by. But mostly it was Citroën DSes, those super-sleek sharks surfacing from the midcentury deep. Powder blue, white, plum and black, each car that flew by felt like a miracle. Seeing them out here, on the narrow roads of the Buckinghamshire countryside, was as close as I could get to the feeling of seeing them unveiled in 1955, when the world had never witnessed anything quite like them.
The DS has long been thought of as the architects’ car, much as the rest of that beatnik New Wave drag - black roll neck, breton shirt, statement glasses – has been a visual shorthand for the profession since the fifties. But perhaps at the time they were just excited to have something that matched the spirit of the buildings they were deisgning. One of the shocks I get looking at contemperaneous photographs of modernst buildings around their completion is the presence of strange old cars, vehicles seemingly time-travelled from another age and left beside these concrete, steel and glass pioneers.
For decades car design seemed trapped in time, the small un-aerodynamic jalopys of the 1930s merely scaled up to become the great lumbering tubs of the fifties, much as how many of the SUVs of today are simply small hatchbacks swollen by 20 per cent. In the US cars start to be squared off and flattened out, great barn doors with details of chrome flicked upwards like the wings of a teen angel’s spectacles, seats like a diner booth, lettering like a motel’s. But in Europe the roads are still dominated by cars styled as stodgy, bulky fridges, until designer Flaminio Bertoni and engineer André Lefèbvre’s collaboration is revealed at Paris Motor Show in October 1955.
While US cars manufacturers were experimenting with space-age flourishes on their saloons and sedans, all Flash Gordon ray guns and B-movie rocketships, the DS is entirely other. It’s the flying saucer, a visitor landed from space, rather than a rocket sent up from the earth. It’s sleek and unknowable, an uncanny form that seems to reject all that we know and shows an entirely new way of doing things.
This year we were in the village when the Citroën Car Club were again meeting, so I wandered over the field and there they were, DSes lined up in rows like Space Invaders. That air of strangeness has never left these cars. And to see so many of them together, you can see why generations of designers have swooned before them, why architects such as Alison Smithson wrote so excitedly about them. They are still radical and chic, still strange as they sink down when parked. The owners wander round gawping at each-other’s motors, saying That’s the one we want isn’t it? or I think we saw you on that tailback outside Gloucester, a sense of companionship and envy in the air, and most of all admiration, more like they own exotic, dangerous pets than have restored a vintage car.
Barbican Rising walk
It used to be a running joke when I used to work at Faber, my colleagues saying to me, John we went to this really amazing place at the weekend, it’s called the Barbican, have you heard of it? Well, now Faber Members have asked me to do a Barbican walking tour, so I can’t tell is this is a compliment or me being trolled. Anyhow, if you fancy a diverting couple of hours wandering around brutalism central with me pointing at geraniums and bush-hammered concrete then please come along! Details here.
Arvon Residential Writing Week – Non-Fiction
In October I’m going to be one of the tutors on an Arvon non-fiction writing week at Totleigh Barton in Devon. The course is being led by the amazing Jude Rogers, author of The Sound Of Being Human, and we also have a special guest slot from Simon Garfield, author of Just My Type.
You know what nerdy subject gets your creativity firing. It might involve film, music, art, architecture, sport, ancient history, nature, collecting strange things – or even stranger things. You’re trying to turn your enthusiasms into a book, but aren’t sure how to shape them into a narrative or effectively build in memoir. In this lively week of workshops, readings and 1:1 tutorials, you’ll learn just how – as well as finding ways to broaden out your experiences to interest as many people as possible, while staying true to your spirit of giddy excitement. Our aim is ato embolden your ideas, as well your passions, and give you strategies and guidance to help your project thrive. You can find out more about the course here.
"super-sleek sharks surfacing from the midcentury deep" is just perfect, John.
I had an uncle who drove one: not just like travelling in a high-speed futuristic space-whale, but also one of very few vehicles as a child in which I wasn't violently car sick :-)
I still adore them: the future rarely looked so good. I always felt slightly disappointed not to step out of it and slip on my personal jetpack.