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IT HAS been a lonely four-and-a-half years for Mike Wilsdon, putting
together the Kew Transport Collection of unusual and utilitarian vehicles.
There have been no helpers, no outside funding and no similar museum to
model his collection on. This week he allowed ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ a preview of
the results.

Housed in a Victorian coach house near Kew Gardens, London, the collection
is anything but glamorous. It is a celebration of past technology that looks
old and rusting. A Second World War veteran’s motorised invalid carriage
in the foyer, lovingly but inexpertly repaired from a wheelchair by its
disabled owner, remains a colourful patchwork of various attempts at restoration.
There are no gleaming Bugattis here.

Instead, there is a diverse assembly of forgotten workhorses and failed
prototypes, arranged to show off common design themes. Rather than collect
similar objects and expose their differences, Wilsdon has brought together
different objects to expose their similarities. ‘Designers rarely start
with a blank sheet of paper,’ he says. ‘I have put together dissimilar objects
with shared features. As well as originality there is immutability in design.
I want people to see the same thing twice, in different contexts,’ he explains.

Wilsdon is hanging vehicles one above another to show recurring themes.
On the floor of the garage there is an unusual car with four-wheel steering;
it dates from the 1960s. Enabling the rear wheels to turn in the same way
as front wheels was an early attempt to give vehicles tighter and smoother
steering. Modern car manufacturers are now re-evaluating the idea.

Because it is difficult to see the mechanism inside the car, Wilsdon
has hung a modern child’s bike with twin wheel steering above the 1960s
car. You can see the mechanics of the system on the bike, which has a steerable
back fork holding the back wheel in place. Twisting the saddle turns the
back wheel. Hanging over the bike is a 1920s invalid carriage with a similar
arrangement, just to show how old the idea is. ‘Honda are making cars like
this now,’ says Wilsdon.

This design-oriented approach stands out from other transport museums.
Elsewhere, there are bus collections, car collections, train collections
but not idea collections. A shining red and brass steam engine in all its
glory is a sight laden with nostalgia, but it does not interest Wilsdon.
‘It would be pointless to paint this to look new,’ he says as he indicates
his motorised roller for levelling roads. ‘It is authentic as it is and
restoration would be unnatural. You would not reglaze a Ming vase.’ Wilsdon
says the road roller is the first with a high-speed, multi-valve engine
of the type that is used today. It is not a relic but a prototype.

Wilsdon is against restoration because he thinks the condition in which
we find a vehicle today tells us a lot about how it was used in the past.
His only concession to restoration is that he will do what is necessary
to halt decay. ‘Some transport specialists spoil specimens by doing too
much. I would like to be remembered for what I have not done.’

Mark Dennison, curator of the London Transport Museum, agrees that ‘most
transport museums do take a very traditional approach’. His own collection
is divided between buses, trains and trams. The museum emphasises the social
history of London’s transportation; it restores vehicles to let visitors
see them as they were. ‘There is a school of thought which ponders restoration,
because it can obscure reality,’ says Dennison. ‘We have had people say
‘they never looked like that in service’.’

‘How you arrange the exhibition depends on whether you think the technological
or social history is the most significant,’ says Dennison. He is considering
changing the structure of his museum’s exhibition. The new display might
break up the neat bus-train-tram division to emphasise social connections;
for example, all the wartime vehicles might be grouped together. He suspects,
however, that the present arrangement is the one the public feels most comfortable
with.

Wilsdon says that some key vehicles have been neglected by museums because
they are simply not glamorous enough. ‘More old Rolls-Royces have been preserved
than utility vehicles. Transport museums are not looking at the origins
of what we use now but at the things we do not. It is a tragedy.’

As well as invalid carriages, Wilsdon has concentrated on the mechanical
carthorses of the past and what he calls ‘the forgotten world of intra-mural
vehicles’, or vehicles used only indoors. The pride of his intra-mural collection
is a Lister warehouse trolley, dating from the 1960s. Still in use today,
and essentially unaltered in its design since 1926, the Lister is probably
cherished only by the warehouse packers who use it.

What makes the Lister special is the arrangement of its front wheel
and engine. The front wheel of the Lister drives the trolley and can be
turned through 360 degrees for maximum manouvrability in tight spaces. Allowing
for the rotation, Wilsdon says, would usually require a very complex arrangement
where the drive shaft from the engine connected with the wheels.

The Lister solves the problem by putting the engine directly on top
of the wheel so that it rotates with it. ‘There is no flamboyant styling
on the Lister,’ says Wilsdon. ‘But it is a high-performance vehicle.’

When the museum opens next year, Wilsdon says, one exhibit will be a
wall of bicycle frames under the title ‘Are Diamonds Forever?’. It is a
survey of attempts to supersede the traditional diamond bike frame. A few
years ago, a bicycle designer decided to leave out the rigid tube that supports
the seat in favour of a loop of steel tubing linking seat, back wheel, pedals
and front fork. The design failed because the frame was not rigid enough
without the seat tube – pedalling caused the top half of the loop to sway
from side to side.

Wilsdon says the bike diamond is strong for the same reason that a deck
chair is: the geometry distributes the forces in such a way that the frame
stays rigid. All the efforts to redesign the bike frame have failed because
the diamond is simply unbeatable, he says. Wilsdon calls the distinctive
deck-chair geometry triangulation. It is one of his guiding themes. ‘Triangulation
is the strength of many structures. People often do not understand it at
first, but they can see how it works in a deck chair.’

Wilsdon, a 46-year-old naval architect, started his collection with
a pram he brought home at the age of four. By the age of 10, he was determined
to open a museum. Now he is nearly there, with a venue and most of the collection
in place. But, according to Michael Ware, curator of the National Motor
Museum in Beaulieu, Hampshire, running the museum on a sound financial footing
will be the most difficult task. ‘To be financially viable any independent
museum has got to have something to attract the public,’ says Ware. He is
concerned that the inexpert public will not be attracted by an unrestored
collection. ‘You have generally got to put things back in a form people
can understand,’ he says.

Wilsdon, who has received no financial assistance, is undaunted. He
bases his confidence on two factors. One is that the museum is just 15 metres
off the tourist thoroughfare from Kew Gardens to the underground station.
The other is that it has the only three-wheeled fire engine in the world.

The fire engine was designed for the War Department in 1937 to be used
inside large factories. Three rather than four wheels help to make the vehicle
more compact. It is the largest item in the Kew collection and has always
been a children’s favourite, says Wilsdon.

After it was taken out of service at the Scammell factory at Watford
in the 1960s, one of the directors gave the fire engine to his children
as a climbing frame. The vehicle stands in the Kew collection with firemen’s
helmets inside and the scratches of children’s shoes on the bonnet.

Inevitably, the Kew collection will be relished as much for its peculiarities
as for its systematic arrangements; after all, one-offs are more fun than
lessons – and some of the museum’s most interesting exhibits are one-offs.
The 1919 ‘ecclesiastique’ two-seater bicycle, once favoured by French clergy,
is articulated in the middle and has its three wheels in a line. The Victorian
bamboo bike is deceptive. It looks marvellously off-beat but it, too, had
to bow to the force of design. While much of the frame is genuine, the main
load-bearing struts are steel, covered and painted to look like bamboo.

The ‘By-Van’ motorbike, dating from 1952, was designed for telegram
deliveries; its engine sits on top of the front wheel and the space between
the rider’s legs is reserved for telegrams. To Wilsdon it is an example
of over-designing a machine. The By-Van had enough space to carry parcels,
but it was being asked to carry only two or three telegrams. Wilsdon thinks
it failed because its lines were too radical for conservative eyes. But
modern couriers with baggage heaped behind them may look back to the By-Van
with envy.

The collection is littered with oddities of this kind, preserved by
Wilsdon for the attractive way in which they offer insights into the process
of design. The final arrangement of the garage, with as many objects hanging
from the roof as sitting on the ground, is intended to give visitors the
opportunity to see more of the design elements.

At the end of the exhibition, there turns out to be a real Bugatti in
the collection. Wilsdon shows it last to the small parties that visit the
museum before its official opening. But the car is not highly polished and
it is there only as part of a display on seating – it is unusual for Bugattis
because it has only one seat. The workaday Lister trolley is, plainly, more
important to Mike Wilsdon than the automotive icon.