Bluebird Continental or Dauphine?

looking for pics and info on bluebird caravans

We are artist family Yoke and Zoom. We have a complex relationship to mobile living spaces. When we first met, we thought up our ideas of making art together in a beautiful 1950's 22ft Bluebird Sabrina. This inspirational, self-sufficient space inspired us to think of projects in a mobile form as a very early element of our practice.

Just two months after our meeting, we lost the caravan, known affectionately as "The big orange caravan" or "Lady Marmalade" to a fire. We escaped alive, but were left homeless and living in emergency housing, before becoming a family and beginning Art School together.

Since the early days,  we have owned two further bluebird caravans, a dreadnought- currently in a sorry state after coming off its tow hitch many years ago and spiking onto a farmers fence near Ross on Wye, and a Dauphine which was sadly scrapped by a disgruntled eco-house builder near Hereford, whom we lent it to in good faith to stay in whilst he constructed.

We have learnt from our mistakes and have loving restored our current trailer, a 1957 Penguin Universal, known as the " mobile cottage". It has toured more than 1200 miles with us after being reappropriated into a Tudor Cottage in New Art Gallery Walsall, going on to visit the Tate Modern, Zoo Art Fair at The Royal Academy of Art and many other places.

Today we were fortunate enough to purchase another Bluebird Dauphine on eBay- the trailer will serve as a mobile modernist project space- produced during the same decade as the Mobile Cottage but hailing to another time and set of values through its refurbishment into an artwork.

This blog is to fill a gap in information on bluebird caravans pre- 1970s, as so little information has been collated and there are no owners clubs, Bluebirds seem to slip under the radar.

if you have any info on bluebirds please add to the blog.