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Title: Bus Fare
Editors: Travis Elborough & Joe Kerr
Publisher: AA Publishing
ISBN: 978-0-7495-7928-9
Specification: 220mm x 140mm, 352pp, hardback
Price: £14.99
This book about the London bus is written for a much wider audience than just bus enthusiasts and has many more words than photographs.
Those who read co-editor Travis Elborough’s 2005 book The Bus We Loved about the Routemaster will have a sense of what is contained between the covers of this title, dedicated to the memory of London Transport bus engineer Colin Curtis and subtitled Collected Writings on London’s Most Loved Means of Transport.
It is essentially a social history of the London bus from George Shillibeer’s pioneering horse-drawn Omnibus of 1829 to the New Routemaster, drawing on works of literature, contemporary newspaper accounts and film appearances to show how it has become interwoven with people’s everyday lives.
There are technical descriptions of some vehicles, but the content is not always complete. For instance, a chapter on World War 2 focuses quite rightly on the impact of bombing on the civilian population, mentioning in addition the 435 Guy Arab utility double-deckers that London Transport received while omittin…
