IDENTITY PARADE
It existed for just four years in the ever changing 1980s, but Kelvin Scottish made a colourful impression on the streets of Glasgow. Thirty years on, The MHD Partnership imagines how its livery could be updated and revived
Kelvin Scottish was a short-lived product of deregulation, part of the state-owned Scottish Bus Group’s plan to compete with local authority-owned Strathclyde’s Buses. It came into being in June 1985 when SBG turned six of its seven territorial subsidiaries into 10 smaller ones more closely aligned to local government boundaries.
Kelvin — taking its name from a major tributary of the River Clyde — welded together the Glasgow area operations of Midland Scottish with the Dunbartonshire arm of Central Scottish. A few months earlier, in a prelude to these changes, Midland took over the routes and vehicles that Eastern Scottish operated from its Baillieston depot on Glasgow’s eastern outskirts, when that depot closed.
SBG decreed that its new subsidiaries’ liveries should evolve from what went before. To replace Midland blue and cream, Eastern Scottish green and cream and Central red and cream, Kelvin chose two-tone blue, the lighter shade of which verged on grey.
The grou…
