Speed

Speed captures the bustling energy and movement of both buses and pedestrians on Regent Street, a busy commercial hub in London’s West End. One double-decker bus has the lettering "SPEE" on its side, which, combined with the curving forms of the buildings and roads, conveys the sensation of speed. This depiction of contemporary urban activity evokes comments by the Italian Futurists Filippo Tommaso Marinetti ("London itself is a Futurist City! Look at those brilliant-hued motor-’buses, these enormous, glaring posters") and Gino Severini ("London is a city where movement and order reign. . . . Motor-omnibuses passing and re-passing rapidly in the crowded streets covered with letters—red, green, white—are far more beautiful than the canvases of Leonardo or Titian, and closer, too, to Nature"), artists whose work Flight knew and whom he may have met.