Yo, I’ll tell you what I want, what I really, really want: the bus from Spice World. The double-decker that transported the Spice Girls through London in 1997 had its own ecosystem. It was a world away from the world, a gaudy enclave personalized for each of the five chicas (to the front and otherwise, slamming as instructed in “Spice Up Your Life”) whose collective girl power would make them the biggest-selling female group in history. 

Nothing about the bus made sense. It was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside, like the time machine from Doctor Who. It kind of felt like its own time machine, in fact—one with toilets that constantly needed unclogging. Somehow there was ample room for Baby Spice’s swing, Posh’s catwalk, Sporty’s workout equipment, Scary’s functioning aquarium, and Ginger’s ’60s decor. Despite the bus having a hodgepodge of colors, its abundant silver seemed space age-y, as if the engine might rocket them to another planet at any moment. (The Spice Girls did meet a few aliens in the movie, after all.) At the end of the film, it was destroyed by a bomb. In real life? It’s as alive and well as a bus can be.

Twenty-five years after Spice World opened in theaters, the bus has a permanent residence on the Isle of Wight, a popular travel destination in the English Channel. A superfan named Suzanne Godley renovated the interior in 2019 and sometimes lists the bus on Airbnb for overnight rentals. The quirks have been sanitized, swapping whimsy for polish and making it a little more practical for the non-pop-star set, but the bus’s façade still bears the Union Jack insignia that the movie’s production designer, Grenville Horner, came up with after seeing Geri Halliwell, a.k.a. Ginger Spice, wear a striking British-flag minidress at the Brit Awards in 1997. 

When I spoke to Horner via Zoom last week, he held up his copy of the original script, which featured Spice World’s working title, Five. He still owns his original sketches and other memorabilia from the film, and he had earmarked a page where screenwriter Kim Fuller described the bus in extraordinary detail.

“There are no seats,” Horner read aloud. “Instead, the whole area is luxuriantly carpeted and sectioned off into areas for each girl, each of these being designed according to their Spice character. Note: There should be five of everything. Five towels, five bathrobes, five toothbrushes, five clothes racks. Emma: fluffy chair, pink wall, lots of teddies and My Little Ponies. Mel B: mystical, Gothic, leopard-skin throws and oriental wall hangings. Geri: ’60s pastiche, posters of Charlie’s Angels. Mel C: exercise bike, posters of Liverpool Football Club. Victoria: Vogue-ish, sleek, rail of expensive clothes. There is also a kitchen area with drinks and food vending machines.”

Horner had already worked with Spice World director Bob Spiers on multiple British comedy series, including French and Saunders and A Bit of Fry and Laurie. With three daughters of his own, he loved the Spice Girls’ 1996 debut album. But what really spoke to him was the movie’s homage to the Beatles’ similarly nonsensical pseudo-documentary A Hard Day’s Night. The Liverpool lads’ madcap adventures felt like a fantasy, which meant everything in Spice World could too. Scenes set inside the bus were even shot at Twickenham Studios, the same place where portions of A Hard Day’s Night and its follow-up, Help!, set up shop in the mid-’60s.

Designing the bus took an army. (No boot camp required.) Horner collaborated with a variety of craftspeople—quilters, drape makers, metal workers, set decorators—to perfect the tiniest details of the bus before production began on the Twickenham soundstage. For inspiration, he looked at the work of architects Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, both known for high-tech expressionism. “It was a mobile dollhouse for grown-ups,” Horner said. And certain decorative aspects ended up being happy accidents. If the design of the carpet looks, in his words, “quite vaginal,” well, he promises that was not intentional. 

Horner has another valuable souvenir in his possession: the miniature-toy version of the Spice Bus, seen in cheeky close-up as Posh raced across Tower Bridge en route to the group’s concert at Royal Albert Hall. The drawbridge was being raised so that a boat could cross the River Thames, putting the singers’ lives in Posh’s well-manicured hands. To maintain the movie’s fantastical tendencies and keep CGI costs down, the flying-bus stunt was executed using a small model that Horner hand-painted. The visibly low-tech charm was a sort of wink to the audience. When he turned the little bus over, superglue once attached to a wire that pulled it across the bridge was still visible. 

The Spice Girls apparently loved the bus’s design so much that they hung out on that particular soundstage during breaks, Horner said. It was like the haven the bus in the film promised, far from the frenzy of the paparazzi. Their sophomore album was on its way to selling 3.2 million copies within 11 months of being released. Spice World producers went to great lengths to keep the women’s whereabouts secret from tabloid photographers and obsessive fans, including using what Horner called “stockades” of vehicles to block any outdoor setups. “I think it’s the most secure set I’ve ever been on,” he recalled.

Critics weren’t kind to Spice World 25 years ago. “What can you say about five women whose principal distinguishing characteristic is that they have different names?” Roger Ebert asked in his blistering review. But millennials have turned the film into a generational touchstone. No, the Spice Girls weren’t meant to be movie stars, but, frankly, neither were the Beatles. Today, the spirit of the movie endures, as does the fun that Horner and his colleagues had while creating something that totally understood its audience. “Spice World didn’t have to make sense,” Horner said. “If people were looking for a serious movie, forget it.”