Think of a symbol for Yorkshire, and you'll probably come up with a white rose, a straight glass of beer or a flat cap. Sorry, but they're all old hat. The new icon of the largest county is to be . . . a taxi - the country's first, specifically regional cab to be precise.
Designers were put on their mettle last weekend by Steve Byers, the Trade and Industry Secretary, who launched the search for a 'Yorkshire taxi' at a conference in Leeds, in the form of a competition for sketches and models of something stylish and practical, but above all unique.
The idea has come from the fledgling Yorkshire Regional Development Agency, one of nine such agencies across England with a clutch of new powers and a lot of money. One of its first ploys is a bid for a Euro-rating as something called an EU 'region of design excellence'. The Yorkshire taxi, to mangle a transport metaphor, is to be the flagship.
'We're looking at other regional icons, including the concept of a Yorkshire teapot,' says Jonathan Sands, Leeds-based designer and chair of the European bid. 'But what's the first thing business visitors or tourists find when they get here on the train or plane? You can't beat the taxi when it comes to giving the first impression of a place.' Exactly the same view comes from downtown Manhattan, where Allan Fromberg surveys the famous yellow dots in the canyons between skyscrapers. As deputy commissioner for taxis and limousines, Fromberg has the cab history handy, and it bears out the theories in Leeds.
Beating the Empire State Building or Statue of Liberty to being the cover image of choice for New York guides, the cab, says Fromberg, 'is the first thing you'll see at JFK Airport, your introduction to what, with due respect to other cities, is the world capital'. Some of Mayor Giuliani's instructions, carried in every sunny-coloured interior, may be a bit theoretical (such as the requirement for all NY cab drivers to speak English), but every rookie tourist wants a yellow cab ride as part of the Manhattan experience.
This, admits Jonathan Sands, is partly the result of thousands of films, plus the fun of guessing the driver's (usually recent) origins - Uzbekistan? Montenegro? - or checking out some of the world's most inventive home-made car air-conditioning systems. But the yellow cab is genuinely a piece of deliberate design, dating back to 1905.
That, says Fromberg, was when another New Yorker called Allan, a taxi fleet proprietor, was hunting around for a livery and became quite intellectual about it all. 'He was reading a psychiatry book that said yellow was a welcoming, pleasing colour,' says Fromberg. 'So he had his cabs done yellow and, son of a gun, it worked - because that's the way they are in Manhattan today.' Colour is likely to be the key ingredient of the Yorkshire taxi, and the Yorkshire Evening Post has got the ball rolling with a witty 'Hockney carriage' cartoon.
'What a brilliant idea,' says Sands, snipping out the paper's drawing of a primary-coloured saloon, a David Hockney print on wheels like an arty version of the Harlequin fun model of the VW Polo. Yorkshire's most famous contemporary painter may have biked round Bradford as a young artist, towing a pram with his canvasses inside, but he wouldn't mind giving his name to a cab.
'A bit like the British Airways tailfins,' muses Sands. 'And Hockney did do a cover for the Bradford telephone directory. You can do so much with colour in design. Look at the Dyson vacuums or the new Apple iMac.' The project's other inspiration, the famous black cab of London, was important for the second side of the design brief - the need for imaginative practical advantages which would also make the Yorkshire taxi different. The monochrome dignity of the London cab may be part of its appeal but its mechanics are also justly celebrated. As far back as 1906, the Metropolitan Police insisted on a maximum turning circle of 25ft in diameter, hence the London taxi's famed ability to spin on a halfpenny. That appeals to Peter Connolly, whose company, Yorkshire Design Services, has brought various novelties to Leeds, including a landlocked pub-in-a-barge.
'Let's look at distinctive and friendly ways of running a Yorkshire taxi,' he says. 'What about insisting on recycled materials for the bodywork and components? Or green fuels: electricity, or this latest idea we've been reading about, compressed air?' Battery-powered cabs were tried in London in 1897, with a maximum 30 miles between chargings and a two-tonne overall weight, which made the victory of petrol-driven versions pretty inevitable seven years later. But technology has shot ahead since then, and Connolly sees the prospect of quiet, urban electric fleets in Sheffield, Hull or York as potentially the key to a regional taxi's appeal.
A final early notion combines both colour and technology. Jonathan Sands speculates about a two-colour Yorkshire taxi system which would pass the 'new and different' test but also have a practical use: 'Why not have small urban taxis, coloured yellow and maybe electric-powered,' he says, 'and bigger blue ones for journeys out of town? Visitors would spot the difference straight away, like the colours on the London Underground map, and each type, the yellow cabs and the blue cabs, could build up their own appeal and image.' Bigger cabs ('Why stick at five passengers?' asks Sands) are on the agenda, too. So is disability access, to be compulsory for all British taxis by 2002, thereby opening another door to fresh bodywork designs.
Blessed by Steve Byers, the briefs have gone out, promoted by a yellow NY cab pootling round Leeds and talks on practical design by Optare, the city's bus-body makers. You need to be Yorkshire, or to move your studio to Yorkshire, to join in. But there's nothing to stop the other regions outside Greater London getting busy on taxis of their own.
