Dropping in on Yacht Designer Dickie Bannenberg in London

“I wonder if Dickie and Simon are around,” I thought to myself as I pulled Dickie Bannenberg’s WhatsApp contact up on my phone.

I love London for a bunch of reasons. First off, my wife’s stepmom lives there (and they’ve always been close!), so London is a second home to us. And since London is also home to a fair number of world-class superyacht designers and brokerage firms, and the UK has a good number of world-class yacht builders, too, I’ve been flying for work from my home in Boston to London for decades.

My most recent trip across the pond was no different than countless other trips I’ve made. There were way more people I’d hoped to visit than I had time to visit. And after a jam-packed year of travel that’s led me to within 500 miles of the North Pole, riding a bicycle across the full length of France, and stumbling upon Hadrian’s Gate in Antalya, Turkey only the week before (among many other adventures), I was eager to head home when I finished the work (shooting some video interviews for an upcoming series) that I was in London to do.

But, that’s when I realized I was only a short walk away from Bannenberg & Rowell’s yacht design studio. 

“I wonder if Dickie and Simon are around,” I thought to myself as I pulled Dickie’s WhatsApp contact up on my phone.

He answered on the second ring! And even though he was meeting with the much, much more important Toby Walker from Benetti, he said: “The more the merrier. It’ll be fun.”

He was right. We had a ball catching up—on yachts, gossip, and, of course, my choice of sneaker style!

But the best part of my visit was getting to learn a bit more about Bannenberg & Rowell’s design for the UK’s “National Flagship” concept. And just to be clear from the outset–NO, the design was not for a new “Royal Yacht”.

The idea behind designing and building a new “National Flagship” for the UK was much bigger than British royalty. The idea was to hold a design competition to come up with a “National Flagship” that could serve as a roaming ambassador to showcase British ingenuity, heritage, engineering, entrepreneurship, and diversity.

It’s a very cool concept and I was totally inspired as Dickie talked about the project and showed me the renderings of what they’d designed. And I must admit to being genuinely excited to see a ship being designed that celebrates economic innovation and power in a much more stylish and peaceful way than a warship does. And as a yachting journalist, I love how Bannenberg & Rowell’s National Flagship design accomplishes such diverse goals with such elegantly powerful lines.

It’s no wonder it was one of two finalists in the National Flagship design competition. Bannenberg & Rowell’s design consortium includes the English design, engineering, and shipbuilding might of Houlder and Frazer-Nash that beat out 16 other teams. In fact, it was looking pretty promising for their design to win the contract until…the UK government pressed the ‘pause’ button on the commissioning of a new state vessel.

Now, this is not the biggest surprise, given the current state of affairs in the world. But since the project remains as relevant and compelling as ever, I’m pretty sure it’s not the last we’ll be seeing of this very cool design.

And since Dickie gave me a signed copy of his masterwork Bannenberg, which explains how his father Jon Bannenberg pioneered the world of superyacht design, it won’t be the last time I drop in on Dickie Bannenberg in London either!