A London book that doesn’t revere the Routemaster
By Alan Millar
Subhead2@The story of London Country Bus Services has been told before, but Peter Aves deserves much credit for looking at it afresh in this account, setting it against what was happening across England and Wales at the same time, rather than placing it in a London bubble.
As someone who loved exploring its routes from his early teenage years, he clearly regrets that so many of them have disappeared, but he offers an intelligent analysis of why they were doomed to die.
This was the National Bus Company subsidiary formed to take over London Transport’s Country Bus & Coach department in January 1970. Its bus routes served a mixture of old market towns, postwar new towns and deeply rural villages and hamlets that 40 years earlier seemed destined to be swallowed up by the endless spread of suburbia. Its Green Line coaches linked these places mainly across London.
In Aves’s words, London Country was a basket case that started out with the oldest fleet in all of NBC, a peak vehicle requirement of 1,122 met mainly with crew-operated London Transport types that were ill suited to its needs.
He blames London Transport for the London Country inhe…
