Bridge: Westminster Bridge
Writer: Aidan Baker
Artist: Clare Trowell.
Title of poem: Red
Title of artwork: Westminster Bridge
The work: Framed linoprint, showing red bus crossing Westminster Bridge amid much blackness; dimensions 42cm x 60 cm, an original reduction linoprint. Sonnet celebrating London buses and deploring a 1930s Duchess of Westminster’s association of them with failure.
RED (Westminster Bridge)
Aidan Baker
“Earth has not anything to show more fair.”
Our bridge, from decades after Wordsworth wrote,
still sees triumphant uses of that quote —
marathon meets demo, Parliament Square.
Red London bus routes level by the ride.
Let’s think of them as one vast playing field.
Duchess Loelia stole a phrase to wield
(but would confess this guilt before she died),
linking red bus and failure. Yes, to her,
whose ducal marriage failed, that was a thing.
Not to me, pensioner, kidlike venturing
red routes across the Thames at Westminster,
her duchy. Red souvenirs gleam on a stall.
Red hearts mourn Covid levels from their wall.
Loelia Lindsay (1902-1993; Duchess of Westminster 1930-1947) is believed to have popularised the aphorism, originally coined by Brian Howard and often misattributed to Margaret Thatcher, “Anybody over the age of 30 seen in a bus has been a failure in life.”