North London Food & Culture

Video: Watch A London Bus Do Press Ups


Sick to the hind teeth of watching lithe athletes showing off in the skimpiest of outerwear? Yup, us too. So we hobbled our way down to Angel with raging post-Opening Ceremony hangovers to catch Czech artist David Cerny’s life-size Routemaster bus doing press-ups. And it was enough to put a smile even on Mrs Kentishtowner’s booze-ravaged visage.

The artist bought the 1957 classic vehicle in the Netherlands and spent 6 months transforming it in an ‘athlete’. But is there a more serious point to it all?

Cerny told the Islington Tribune: ‘Press-ups are a particular physical exercise which every athlete does, but they also form part of a military drill and sometimes are forced on prisoners as punishment.


LOCAL ADVERTISING


‘I hope, besides its monumentality and humour, the London Booster shows a certain ambivalence and irony.’

It doesn’t seem very ambivalent to us. But do catch it grunt and groan (as captured by our trembling paws in the video below) till Aug 12.


4 thoughts on “Video: Watch A London Bus Do Press Ups”

  1. Eek!! I’m sick to the hind teeth of people assuming that any half-cab red bus is a Routemaster!
    It’s not a Routemaster and it’s not a London bus. It’s a Bristol Lodekka and it spent its working life on the Isle of Wight before heading off to the Netherlands.

      1. I would, but as far as I could tell from the info there, the artist & organisers haven’t called it a Routemaster or a London bus. It is a very clever piece of engineering though none the less, and just thought you’d appreciate accuracy in your fine blog! 🙂

Leave a Comment

4 thoughts on “Video: Watch A London Bus Do Press Ups”

  1. Eek!! I’m sick to the hind teeth of people assuming that any half-cab red bus is a Routemaster!
    It’s not a Routemaster and it’s not a London bus. It’s a Bristol Lodekka and it spent its working life on the Isle of Wight before heading off to the Netherlands.

      1. I would, but as far as I could tell from the info there, the artist & organisers haven’t called it a Routemaster or a London bus. It is a very clever piece of engineering though none the less, and just thought you’d appreciate accuracy in your fine blog! 🙂

Leave a Comment

About Kentishtowner

The award-winning print and online title Kentishtowner was founded in 2010 and is part of London Belongs To Me, a citywide network of travel guides for locals. For more info on what we write about and why, see our About section.