William Towns: The Man Who Designed Cars With a Ruler
The 1970s was a decade of questionable taste. Terrible trousers, even worse music, and car design that seemed determined to offend the eye. And in the middle of this aesthetic wasteland was William Towns, set on creating the future with a ruler and a set square. He was less a car stylist and more a brutalist architect who'd decided that building supercars would be more fun than car parks.
Towns started his career at Rover, working on the magnificent, jet-powered Rover-BRM racing car. This experience clearly had a profound effect on him, mostly by convincing him that normal cars were far too round. When Aston Martin hired him in the late 1960s, a company famous for its swooping, beautiful sports cars, it was like putting a modernist architect in charge of restoring a Georgian mansion.
Dragging Aston Martin into the Modern World
His first job was to design a new car to sit alongside the ageing, curvaceous DB6. The result was the 1967 Aston Martin DBS. It was a car that looked like a Savile Row suit that had been in a knife fight. It was handsome, but it was also hard, muscular, and thoroughly modern. The traditional, friendly Aston Martin grille was gone, replaced by a full-width grille with four headlamps. It was a clear statement that the old, gentle Aston Martin was dead, and something much more aggressive had taken its place.
The Spaceship from Newport Pagnell
But the DBS was just a warm-up act. By the mid-1970s, Aston Martin was, as was traditional, on the verge of financial collapse. The new owners decided they needed a car so shocking, so utterly audacious, that it would force the world to pay attention. They gave William Towns a clean sheet of paper. What he came back with was not a car. It was a four-door, wedge-shaped spaceship that appeared to have been folded out of a single, gigantic piece of aluminium foil by an angry giant.
The 1976 Aston Martin Lagonda was a jaw-dropping spectacle. It was so low, so wide, and so sharp that you felt you might cut yourself just by looking at it. The interior was even more insane. It had the world's first digital dashboard, a glorious, flashing, futuristic display that promised the year 2000 but delivered the reliability of a 1970s British Leyland electrical system. It almost never worked. The car was a magnificent, beautiful, and deeply flawed masterpiece.
The Bulldog: Turning it up to Eleven
Having created the world's most dramatic saloon, Towns then decided to give the supercar the same treatment. In 1979, Aston Martin built a one-off prototype called the Bulldog. If the Lagonda was a spaceship, the Bulldog was its fighter escort. It was an impossibly low, incredibly wide wedge with five hidden headlights and enormous, powered gullwing doors. It was a machine of pure, distilled menace. It was the Lagonda's design philosophy with all the sensible bits, like rear seats and visibility, thrown in the bin.
A Life After Aston
After his spectacular work for Aston Martin, Towns set up his own design consultancy and continued his love affair with the straight line. His most famous creation of this period was the Hustler, a bizarre, angular, and charmingly utilitarian kit car. Built from simple, flat panes of glass and based on humble Austin Mini mechanicals, the Hustler was a masterpiece of minimalist design. It was, in its own way, just as pure and logical as the mighty Lagonda.
William Towns was a true visionary, a man who was resolutely uninterested in the past. He didn't draw pretty, nostalgic shapes; he created dramatic, logical, and sometimes difficult objects of the future. For one brilliant decade, he was the man who made Aston Martin look like it was ready to conquer the universe.