Lee Bender's Bus Stop

By Pendle Harte on March 10th 2010

Lee Bender can’t quite believe that anyone’s interested. Amazingly, the woman behind the boutique that defined a decade in Kensington Church Street fears that her work is forgotten. She’s not someone to harp on about the past. So it’s really only by chance that she has brought out a book about her old shop, and still she’s surprised that anyone cares. The shop? Bus Stop, a bright red beacon that lit up Kensington Church Street from 1969 to 1979, attracting the whole of London’s new clothes-loving public and shifting so much stock that it ran out of clothes the day it opened.

Lee Bender went pretty quiet after Bus Stop closed and though a lot of clobber was produced under the label over the course of a decade, you don’t find Bus Stop clothes in vintage shops much. Where did it all go? There are a very few Bus Stop pieces in the V&A and I am expecting to see some more when I visit Lee’s Notting Hill house, where I assume she is hoarding a vast wardrobe full. Not so. “Oh no, I didn’t keep anything,” she says, shocked. “It’s not my thing to keep clothes. I’ve always been interested in the future, not the past. And like most people who make something, I get embarrassed by my own things so I never kept anything.” So it’s a surprise even to her that she now finds herself with a book all about Bus Stop, unashamedly looking back at the past. “I did keep the cuttings, though I got depressed about them, not knowing what to do with them. I thought it was old hat and nobody would be interested.” Until a friend phoned from Singapore to say they’d just seen a book about Biba and why wasn’t she doing one about Bus Stop? “It was when he said he’d help me write it that I was persuaded.”

Lee is an illustrator and for her, the appeal of the book was not to go through the old material but the opportunity to do some new illustrations. And the chance to make use of all her cuttings. “If I hadn’t been able to do new drawings in a new way I couldn’t have done it because that was what interested me about the book. I’m not the sort of person to delve into the past. I don’t like the past; and I don’t like it when I’m designing. It’s always been about the future for me.” Moreover, for someone who made her name with such fearless items as the satin hot pant and the spotted playsuit, Lee is surprisingly shy and self-effacing. She lacks the vanity to harp on about her own past and is about as far from a gushing fashion person as it’s possible to be.

Lee Bender founded Bus Stop with her husband Cecil, whom she met when she joined his manufacturing company as a designer. “I got the job then I married him,” she says shyly. They were living in Kensington (where Lee had also grown up) when Biba opened in Abingdon Road (“which was such a remote place but still everybody went there”) and she was impressed by its co-ordinated collections. “Because in those days you were either a frock designer or a coat designer or a skirt designer, you didn’t do everything. And I thought, God, I could do that, so easy – it was so obvious but nobody saw it.” So she did her own collection with accessories and everything and they found a former grocery shop in Kensington Church Street and opened for business. “On the first day there was a queue outside. Church Street had become the place to go and we were cheap. We sold everything, even the cushions in the window.” Cheap clothes were a novelty – until then, cheap clothes had been very basic and expensive clothes very expensive. Bus Stop bridged the gap with well-designed pieces that were made in its own factory, so Lee could do what she liked. “You could have a new dress every week because it was only £2, so we couldn’t keep up and kept running out of clothes at first.  It was quick, quick, quick, all the time.” Lee worked on her designs in a studio in Kensington Church Walk, behind the shop, and everything in the shop was hers. Belts, jewellery, scarves and all the clothes. Bus Stop pioneered the revivals of Fair Isle knits and tartan; it went through phases of jumpsuits and culottes, military and safari, asymmetrical tops and 1940s shoulders, bikinis, Op Art and florals, cheesecloth and seersucker, fake fur and satin as well as countless other crazes over the course of its ten-year reign.

By 1979 there were 12 branches of Bus Stop throughout the country, though Church Street remained the only London branch. Lee had had enough of the fast-paced world of cheap fashion and when a lucrative offer came in for the business, she sold it to a company that would become French Connection. So the Bus Stop label closed exactly 10 years after it opened. Lee opened another boutique under her own name in Knightsbridge, a more grown-up shop, but in 1992 closed it and was recruited by the UN as a fashion adviser, a job that took her all over the world: “I designed collections in Hong Kong, Kathmandu, Botswana, Mauritius, Ethiopia and all over to show them what they had to do for the British market.” She moved to France and gave all her old things to charity shops and stopped thinking about Bus Stop, though remained “depressed about the cuttings”. Until the phone call got her to thinking about a book. “I showed a few drawings  to the guy at the V&A and he said that they’d do an exhibition if I had the clothes. But I didn’t have them.”

There’s no doubt that some W8 wardrobes will be still hoarding some  Bus Stop bits.  And anyone who wants to spot the shop will notice the original glass frontage still looking good at number 3, a few houses away from the actual bus stop. You can’t miss it. l

Lee Bender will be giving a talk about Bus Stop at the V&A on 23 April.    vam.ac.uk

Members Comments

• Comment by: lindagill 23 April 2010 - 09:24

  I've just retired, and moved house quite a few times since the 60s, but despite many clearouts, I've still got my Bus Stop blouse. I was so thrilled to buy it - I remember it seemed a lot of money, and it's still treasured.

  Report this comment

• Comment by: Rachel-Best 09 May 2010 - 22:10

  I loved Bus stop clothes-I was thrilled to be the manager of the Manchester branch back in 1973-1976! The clothes where fab - we were a great team in the busiest trendiest shop in the centre of Manchester-great memories sorry to miss Lee Benders talk at the
  V& A.

  Report this comment

Add a Comment

Please log in to post a comment.