STEPHEN BAYLEY: The Aesthete

'THE PARKING SPACE OUTSIDE MIGHT ALREADY HAVE BEEN TAKEN BY ONE OF THE DAVE CLARK FIVE IN A MINI COOPER'

Last Sunday was the first sunny Sunday of the year. And, as usual, I was ambling along Chelsea’s King’s Road. What you might call ‘car ecology’ has always fascinated me, the relationship between certain cars and certain environments. Sometimes these relationships seem dissonant. For example, I’d be astonished if, on my next visit to Birkhall, the King’s retreat near Balmoral, I were to find a candy-apple green 1966 Chevy Chevelle SS parked near the stables. A muddy Series II Land Rover? Of course.

But more often these relationships seem just right, some of them defining our expectations of the car itself. London has always been a theatre where these relationships have been rehearsed, and the King’s Road has long been a crucible for alloying people and machines in meaningful symbiosis. In the 1960s, ambitious designer entrepreneurs (I am thinking of Terence Conran) would cruise the length in their E-types, possibly stopping at The Chelsea Drugstore to admire the delivery girls in electric blue jump-suits with their rasping Vespas. The parking space outside might already have been taken by one of The Dave Clark Five in a Mini Cooper.