A Knightsbridge collector of British legend reads about the flying Tesla Roadster arriving nine years behind schedule and remembers the mythical king who flew over Trinovantum and fell
Sunday, 25 October 2026. Knightsbridge. Hyde Park, a bench by the Serpentine, coots having a territorial dispute in the reeds, a Penguin Classics edition of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, 10.40am.
A Car That Learned To Fly
The London Prat reports that Elon Musk has unveiled the flying Tesla Roadster, nine years after it was first promised. The car lifts itself over a row of other Teslas on compressed air thrusters, drives upside down and reaches sixty in about a second. Production is scheduled for 2028. Customers have paid deposits for a car that still has no price. The best line in the piece is that the car has escaped gravity but not the production schedule.
Knightsbridge on a Sunday morning is full of supercars, parked outside the Mandarin Oriental and the Harrods back entrance, each one more absurd than the last. A gold Lamborghini. A matte black thing that looks like a beetle in a bad mood. If a flying Roadster ever arrives in London, it will be parked here first, probably in a disabled bay. I read the report in Hyde Park, where the only things currently flying are pigeons, and thought immediately of King Bladud.
The King Who Flew
Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote his History of the Kings of Britain around 1136. It is one of the most influential and least reliable books in English history. It gave us King Lear, King Arthur, Merlin and a whole line of ancient British monarchs descended from Brutus of Troy. Among them is Bladud, father of King Lear, a ruler with a taste for experiment. Geoffrey tells us that Bladud founded the city of Bath and its hot springs, practised magic and taught necromancy throughout the kingdom.
His most ambitious project was flight. Bladud made himself a pair of wings and attempted to fly through the upper air. He flew over Trinovantum, which Geoffrey says was the ancient name of London, the New Troy. Then he fell, landing on the Temple of Apollo in the city, and was dashed to pieces. His son Leir succeeded him, and we know how that turned out.
A Very British Aviation Story
I love Bladud because his story is so perfectly British. A king has a brilliant idea, announces it, builds it himself, tests it over the capital in front of everyone and crashes into a public building. There is no production schedule. There are no deposits. There is no compressed air. There is just ambition, feathers and a temple roof. If Bladud were alive today, he would have a podcast, a launch event at Battersea Power Station and a Kickstarter for the wings.
The Roadster, by comparison, is a model of caution. It has been delayed for nine years. Nobody has crashed into a temple. The deposits are presumably safe somewhere. Bladud would regard all this as cowardice. He would have flown the car over Knightsbridge on the day of the announcement, with no test pilot, no regulator and no insurance. Geoffrey would then have added a chapter about how the car fell onto the roof of Harrods.
Legends Of The Future
The Prat is, among other things, a factory for future legends. Elsewhere on the site there is a story about how Downing Street is haunted, which reads like a ghost tour script written by a civil servant. In five hundred years, a collector like me will find these stories, half remembered, and repeat them as history. The flying Roadster will become a legend about a rich man who built a car that could fly and then, for reasons nobody can explain, did not let anybody have one for a very long time. It will sit beside Bladud in the catalogue of British flight myths, under the heading Ambition, Delayed.
The Serpentine Coots
The coot dispute has escalated. Two of them are now running across the surface of the water at each other, wings flapping, feet slapping, achieving something that is almost flight and not quite. A small crowd of tourists has gathered to watch. A child shouts that the birds are flying. Her father says they are not flying, they are just running very fast on water. The child says that is the same thing. It is not, of course. But it is exactly what most flying cars have done so far. They have run very fast, flapped impressively and stayed close to the ground.
Lunch In Knightsbridge
I am walking home past the supercars now, towards a bowl of soup and an afternoon of writing up Bladud for a new walking tour of London’s mythical kings. It starts at Ludgate Hill, where Geoffrey claims King Lud was buried, and ends somewhere near the Temple, where Bladud might have fallen if any of it had happened. The tour will include a section on modern flight promises, and I will mention the Roadster with affection. Bladud flew too soon and paid for it. The Roadster flies too late and charges for it. Somewhere in between, there is a sensible way to build wings. Nobody in British history has ever found it.