Title: Last Years of the London Metrobus
Authors: Matthew Wharmby
Publisher: Pen & Sword Transport
ISBN: 978-1-52674-967-3
Specification: 285mm x 220mm, 192pp, hardback
Price: £30
Title: London’s Seventies Buses
Authors: Matthew Wharmby
Publisher: Capital Transport
ISBN: 978-1-85414-443-0
Specification: 200mm x 210mm, 96pp, softback
Price: £14.95
Matthew Wharmby has established a niche as the go-to man for books on the recent London bus scene — from the era of rear-engined double-deckers onwards. These two productions from two different publishers add to his coverage of the period.
The Metrobus book complements his similar deep delve into the final years of the contemporary Leyland Titan (Reviews, November), chronicling the longer swansong of a larger class of vehicles that survived into the late 1990s with eight of the privatised ex-London London Buses subsidiaries.
It is a vehicle about which he has an immense fondness, which is a good standpoint from which to begin. Metrobuses were, he argues, ‘the best modern vehicles you could buy’. Even though it subsequently transferred its affections to Leyland’s Olympian, London Transport clearly shared this opinion by taking 1,442 of them between 1978 and 1986.
The …
