REVIEWS
Title: Reshaping London’s Buses
Editor: Barry Arnold & Mike Harris
Publisher: Capital Transport Publishing
ISBN: 978-1-854144-28-7
Specification: 275mm x 220mm, 176pp, hardback
Price: £30
The story of the proposed reshaping of London Transport’s bus services 50 years ago is well known, one in which hundreds of unreliable and oversized standee singledeckers were unleashed on to shortened suburban routes, only to be consigned for scrap within a few years.
Or is that what really happened? Mike Harris and Barry Arnold, both of them career London busmen who know the story from the inside and have talked to others more closely involved in its implementation, have performed a valuable service in the cause of history by looking afresh at the subject for this Capital Transport book, produced to the publisher’s usual high standards.
Yes it was a failure, but they question some of the lazy assumptions. For example, they say that the premature disposal of the AEC Merlin and Swift single-deckers was a consequence of the decision not to complete the reshaping of routes and not because they were especially unreliable.
The real failure, they argue, was the fare structure and London Transport’s inability to find …
