Title: London Buses in the 1970s
Author: Jim Blake
Publisher: Pen & Sword Transport
ISBN: 978-1-47388-720-6
Specification: 290mm x 220mm, 164pp, hardback
Price: £25
Title: The British Transport Commission Group
Author: Jim Blake
Publisher: Pen & Sword Transport
ISBN: 978-1-47385-722-3
Specification: 290mm x 220mm, 156pp, hardback
Price: £25
Pen & Sword is providing Jim Blake with a medium to share more of the 100,000 black and white photographs he took in the 1960s and 1970s. In both of these, he presents his subjects in chronological order.
His knowledge of London matters is particularly exhaustive, and his coverage of the capital’s buses in 1970 to 1974 is of a period of great change that saw London Transport’s bus operations split into two parts, the red Central Area transferred from state to local authority control, the green Country Area and Green Line coaches kept in state ownership but as the National Bus Company’s London Country Bus Services.
This also was when expansion of one-person operation brought new, mainly rear-engined types into both fleets with what might be termed euphemistically as mixed results.
Blake does not do euphemisms. He writes as he sees things and writes bluntly when he c…
