When I first moved to London and had more time than friends in the vicinity I spent a lot of time riding around on double decker buses just looking at the city. My favourite moments on those journeys were spotting the random things that people at street level couldn’t see. The winning object? An apple-sized ceramic ginger cat head perched on top of a garage on Highbury Grove Road, which watched the traffic with appropriately catlike disdain. Having shared a childhood home with a large number of cat ornaments, I am pretty sure the head was the lid of a teapot.

Ginger Cat Teapot

The flat tops of bus stops also yielded a fascinating array of items (including the Shoreditch meteorites) but rather a lot of single shoes and empty vodka bottles. So while I am very pleased to hear that the Bus.tops project which plans to cover 64 bus stop roofs in LEDs to display digital artworks has got the go-ahead, there’s a little wistful nostalgia mixed in. Regular readers will know I have strong feelings about public art, and I like this idea a lot. It has the potential to brighten the grim journeys made by millions of Londoners every day, while getting art out of the gallery and clawing back some of our shrinking public space before advertisers get hold of it (although I wouldn’t be surprised if they cotton on soon). But I can’t help wondering if any of those bus stops are already decorated with bizarre discarded items, and whether some lonely passenger will miss the mystery. Anyway, here’s their short video introduction on the Bus.tops site. There’s some annoying ‘urban’ jazz, and one of the artists describes bus stops as ‘street furniture’ but don’t let that put you off the whole project.