Thomas Heatherwick

The first buses reinstated the rear open platform of the 1950s AEC Routemaster, but the expense of staffing the rear door led to elimination of the feature after 2015.

Thomas Alexander Heatherwick, (born 17 February 1970) is an English designer and the founder of London-based design practice Heatherwick Studio.

He works with a team of more than 200 architects, designers and artisans from a studio and workshop in King's Cross, London.

In his final year at RCA in 1994, Heatherwick met designer Terence Conran; after seeing Heatherwick's plan for a Gazebo made of two curved stacks of birch plywood, Conran invited him to construct it at his country home, and bought it.

Heatherwick founded Heatherwick Studio in 1994 after his graduation from the RCA.

Conran asked Heatherwick to make an interior display for the Conran Shop, which led to his first public commission after Mary Portas saw it and commissioned Heatherwick to make a window display for the 1997 London Fashion Week at the Harvey Nichols department store.

He is a Senior Fellow and external examiner at the Royal College of Art, a Senior Research Fellow at the Victoria & Albert Museum; a fellow of the Royal Academy, and a Royal Designer for Industry.

In 2002, as part of a redevelopment of Paddington Basin, Heatherwick Studio designed The Rolling Bridge, a canal bridge that opens by curling into a circle rather than rising in one or more rigid sections.

The tallest public sculpture ever erected in Britain, it was commissioned to commemorate the 2002 Commonwealth Games, and took its name from a quote from former Olympic sprint champion Linford Christie about the explosion of energy as a runner starts out of the blocks.

Danny Boyle said it was the inspiration for his asking Heatherwick to design the Olympic cauldron.

However, technical problems caused one of the spikes to dislodge within two weeks, and a further 22 required removal over the next four years.

The Rolling Bridge won the 2005 British Constructional Steelwork Association's Structural Steel Award.

Heatherwick's design for B of the Bang, a £1.42 million 56m-high sculpture of 180 giant steel spikes, was unveiled outside the City of Manchester Stadium in 2005.

In 2007 Heatherwick Studio completed the East Beach Café at Littlehampton, West Sussex.

The long, single-storey building with a rippled silhouette evoking a sea shell has an outer skin of steel which was allowed to rust before the resulting colours were fixed with an oil-based coating.

The café won a RIBA National Award in 2008.

Despite a plea from Angel of the North creator Anthony Gormley to Manchester City Council which described the sculpture as "remarkable, dynamic and engaging", it was dismantled and placed in storage in 2009.

In 2009, Heatherwick was appointed to redesign the church interior at Worth Abbey.

The new furnishings, including pews, choir stalls, monastery seats, desks and confessionals, were made of solid hardwood, ash embedded within walnut, but the pews began to crack after a few months.

Heatherwick blamed the contractor.

Heatherwick's projects, many of which have won design awards, include the UK pavilion at Expo 2010, the renovation of the Hong Kong Pacific Place, the Olympic cauldron for the 2012 Summer Olympics and Paralympics, Vessel in New York City, and the New Routemaster bus.

The Garden Bridge over the Thames in Central London was cancelled.

Heatherwick was born in London.

His mother designed jewellery; his father was a musician, ran a charity and later worked for Heatherwick's design firm.

His maternal great-grandfather was the owner of Jaeger, the London fashion firm, one of his grandmothers founded the textile studio at Marks & Spencer and was subsequently an art therapist, and his uncle was the journalist Nicholas Tomalin.

After primary school in Wood Green, he attended the Rudolf Steiner School Kings Langley, in Hertfordshire, which emphasises gardening, handcrafts, and the performance art of eurythmy, and Sevenoaks School in Kent.

He studied three-dimensional design at Manchester Polytechnic and furniture design at the Royal College of Art (RCA).

Heatherwick Studio designed the UK's pavilion, dubbed "Seed Cathedral", for Expo 2010 in Shanghai.

In keeping with the exposition theme, "Better City, Better Life", the pavilion explored the relationship between nature and cities.

It was set in a parklike environment and consisted of a timber and steel composite framework pierced by 60,000 fibre-optic rods, each housing on the inside one or more plant seeds from Kew Gardens' Millennium Seed Bank Partnership.

The UK pavilion won the gold medal of the Bureau International des Expositions for best pavilion design in its size class, and the RIBA Lubetkin Prize.

After the Expo, the pavilion was dismantled, and some rods were donated and others auctioned off for charity.

In 2010, the Mayor of London Boris Johnson announced that Heatherwick Studio would be designing the New Routemaster double-decker bus, the first bus in more than 50 years to be commissioned specifically for London.

He has served on numerous judging and advisory panels and has given talks at institutions including the RIBA, Bartlett School of Architecture, the South Africa Design Indaba conference, the Royal Academy and TED2011.

A prototype by Wrightbus was unveiled in December 2011; the first buses entered service in February 2012 and Transport for London ordered 600 in September 2012 and a further 200 in 2014.

The design features a long front window for the driver and a wrapped glazing panel for passengers, with three doors and two staircases for faster and easier boarding.

The diesel-electric hybrid engine is also significantly more fuel-efficient than previous hybrid buses.

The council sued Heatherwick Studio and their subcontractors over the problems, settling out of court for £1.7m, and in 2012 the sculpture's core was sold for scrap.

After complaints from passengers about excessive heat in summer, starting in 2015 the buses were retrofitted with openable windows.

There were also complaints about faulty batteries leading to high emissions from over-reliance on the diesel engine.