About This Site

The Bus-Tops Shelters site lets all Londoners have their say in where we install the Bus-Tops. Mostly the installations will be seen by people travelling on buses, but when making your selections also keep in mind any buildings at the site which overlook the shelter. You will be able to examine the area surrounding each site using Google street-view on the map page.

To get started, register here and take a look around the site. You might want to start on the map page, where you can search for bus shelters by postcode or address. You may choose up to 3 sites you would most prefer the Bus-Tops to be installed on. We'd love you to tell us why you are selecting these sites, so whenever you make a selection you will be able to leave a comment on why you made that choice.

If you have any questions at all please feel free to get in touch, or if you're having any issues using the site take a look at the help pages. You can keep up with our work by following us on Twitter or keeping an eye on the blog.

The Bus Tops Project:

Bus-Tops is a public art project which won the London arc of the Arts Council/LOCOG 'Artists Taking The Lead' competition. Our project is one of 12 commissions across the nation, one in each of the English regions and one in each of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Bus-Tops are screen based sculptural installations to be installed on the roofs of bus shelters across London, forming a city-wide exhibition platform for artists to show their work. Currently in prototyping and development (as of August 2010), the installations will be in place from July 2011 and remain until at least the end of September 2012.

There are lots of metaphors that help us imagine what these Bus-Tops installations will be, the most useful one is that for 12 months we will have visitors living in locations you can help choose all across London. London is a city of old and new, citizens and visitors, and we all experience the city uniquely through a confluence of senses and emotions, experiences and ideas. The Bus-Tops installations are the same; like any visitor to London, they will be gathering knowledge of the city all the time – forming impressions and tastes: preferences. They will join the citizens of London during the run up to the Olympics, and experience the Olympics with us.

Here is our development time-line:

• May 2010 – December 2010: Hardware prototyping and testing
• January 2011 – March 2011: Manufacturing and testing
• December 2010 – March 2011: Web and mobile software development and testing
• April 2011- June 2011: Closed software beta to artists and developers (we will do our first run of artist curation during this period)
• July 2011: Launch: Curated work and work created by artists during the beta phase to form the first ‘run’ of work to be displayed
• July 2011 – August 2012: from launch onwards all the tools to create and view content for/from the canvases will be live and public

Find out more about the project at the main Bus Tops site.