When I first heard of the new ‘cycle super highways’ that run into central London from the suburbs, my first reaction was to compare and contrast the achievements of our newt loving former mayor Ken Livingstone with those of the incumbent Boris Johnson.

In the red corner we have Ken. A bit foul-mouthed, a bit bossy. But he introduced the first major stand against the hegemony of the automobile by any major city in the world: The Congestion  Charge. It needed sharp political instincts to bulldoze it through, a commitment of hundreds of millions of pounds in new technology and the willingness to upset large swathes of the electorate.

There was another world first in the Oyster card, a ground-breaking automated transport ticket with the potential to become an electronic currency holder.

In the blue corner we have Boris. And what is his big achievement to date? Well he got some paint and coloured long stretches of London’s roads an azurey sort of blue. Why blue? “For high levels of visibility, to provide a consistent look and feel, and to distinguish them from the green lanes of the London Cycling Network,” says Transport for London.

But then I realised that I had completely missed the point. The correct name for these cycle lanes is ‘Barclays Cycle Superhighways’. And no, they are not a revolution in transport. They are a revolution in branding. They are a marketing putsch, an extraordinary corporate coup d’etat staged by Barclays.

That may sound a little rich for what is just a cycle lane, but consider this. The hundreds of miles of proposed cycle super highways wont be painted in any old blue. They will be in near 100 per cent cyan. It’s a colour otherwise known as Barclays blue. In other words, large stretches of one of the world’s greatest cities will be swathed in corporate livery. Barclay’s corporate livery.

Barclay’s has branded the very ground beneath our feet, it has turned our streets into an advertisement, albeit one that measures 225 kilometres (the combined length of the 15 proposed cycle routes) by 1.5 metres (the width of the routes). It has turned the landscape into a brandscape.

The idea that the streets of London should be coloured Barclay blue may not to be everybody’s taste, but you have to admire their daring, their imagination and the scale of their ambition .

Fred Butler is a London-based props and accessories designer who specialises in creating one-off and imaginative pieces for stylists and magazines. Her collaborative work has appeared in Dazed & Confused magazine, the windows of Selfridges and La Roux’s recent ‘Bulletproof’ music video. Her focus is to create original fashion stories that enhance the aesthetics of the work in question with her work often characterised by the inclusion of everyday objects to create a kitsch yet elegant beauty.

When you see Fred’s work you can’t help but be astonished by the amount of colour, vibrancy and excitement she manages to bring together. Check out her catalogue of fresh and ingenious accessories at Fred Butler Style, where you can also view her recently launched collection of inspirational pieces.

Contrail is a fanastic device that is attached above the back wheel of the bike covering it with a layer of chalk, turning your bike into a giant crayon on wheels. Visually the city streets will come to life with colourful lines by uniting commuters mapping out their daily path.

Designed by Pepin Galardi of Studio Gelardi ‘the idea of safety in numbers’

By using this device, bicyclists will have a clearer path on which to ride safely and out of the way of vehicular traffic. At the same time, as more bicyclists using the Contrail go over a line created by a cyclist before them, the line gets brighter allowing drivers to clearly see a marked bike path where there might be none. It’s sort of similar to what happens when a dirt path appears in a grassy field after lots of people have taken the same shortcut over a period of time.

http://gelardi.com/portfolio/contrail/