Newspaper Article

Soviet superpower: why Russia has the world's most beautiful bus stops

Wainwright, Oliver

2015

Overview

In western Europe, the bus stop is the most humble of building types, a meanly utilitarian structure that adds little or nothing to the roadside. But in the old Soviet empire, from the shores of the Black Sea to the Kazakh steppe, the norm is \"wild going on savage\", as Jonathan Meades writes in a beautiful new photobook featuring 159 bus stops, each illuminating \"the Soviet empire's taste for the utterly fantastical\". The project began in 2002, when [Christopher Herwig] decided to cycle from London to Stockholm, to live with his girlfriend. \"Taking a bike on Ryanair,\" he explains, \"would have cost four times the price of a seat.\" As he set off, he gave himself a challenge: to photograph something interesting every hour of the way. A particular roadside feature began to catch his eye, and so began an obsessive quest. \"It wasn't until I got into the Baltic countries,\" he says, \"that they jumped out at me. Within the first 50km of Lithuania, I noticed these peculiar bus stops everywhere.\" Twelve years and more than 30,000km later, Herwig was able to choose his favourite bus stops from 14 former Soviet countries.It seems the \"bus pavilions\", as they were respectably known, provided a much needed outlet for creative energy, which was otherwise stifled. \"It was practically impossible to express oneself,\" Armen Sardarov, a Belarusian architect who designed close to 100 bus stops in the Soviet era, says in the book. \"It was a time of monotony in architecture.\"

• Publisher: Guardian News & Media Limited
• Subject: Herwig, Christopher / Meades, Jonathan