Bus.tops – a city wide canvas for sharing the art of our streets, our communities, our London, our experience.

Marika jostles back and forth as she struggles up the stairs to the top of the 242 bus. There are seats below but she likes the view, she likes the feeling that she is seeing a different London. A London of gargoyles so high up no one can see them from the streets, a London of facades so old no one knows what lies under the grime, a London of adventures and characters. Today, a story begins to unfold. From bus.top to bus.top Marika follows a visual adventure as she sits on the top deck of the 242.

Amir clicks on the web page to his favourite bus.top. Every Wednesday at 2.30pm, someone called J1ll posts a collection of her housemate’s favourite memories from the week to her local bus.top in Hackney. One of them always has something to say about the football..usually a great laugh. Amir reckons he could do something on bus.tops. He and his schoolmates play hockey at school…wouldn’t it be wicked to play a game of hockey across all of London. Hackney could be one goal and Harlesden is the other…Amir takes another look at the bus.tops website…

Bus.tops provides the canvas that allows London to tell its stories. These can be small, intimate stories of a neighbourhood or citywide adventures that draw us into a London we never imagined; or simply moments of beauty, wonder, questioning, critique, comment and exploration. These stories unfold on a canvas made up of networked panels of programmable LEDs situated on the roofs of bus stops across London.

As well as the canvas, Bus.tops provides the tools and platform from which both publicly recognised artists and the public we recognise as artists are empowered to create a truly public art experience. Bus.tops will work with established artists to create a “curated” collection of works distributed across the bus.tops canvas. These will be celebrated as being at the vanguard of artistic innovation and exploration. However these works will also be the foundation from which a new generation of authors and artists will be inspired create their first piece of public art.

Bus.tops provides a window for the world to experience and explore the cultural richness and diversity that makes up Greater London. But critically, it will also provide the means by which we within London understand and value that same cultural richness and diversity across our communities.

The potential of bus.tops is only limited by the imagination of 8 million Londoners.