Title: Around Waltham Forest by Bus, Tram and Train
Author: Roger Torode
Publisher: The Omnibus Society
ISBN: 978-1-90909-134-4
Specification: 220mm x 210mm, 120pp, softback
Price: £15
In his preface to this highly informative and delightfully illustrated picture album, London Transport Museum director Sam Mullins explains that public transport was the medium that turned the north-eastern boroughs of Leyton, Walthamstow and Chingford into suburbs of Greater London.
The book tells a story from stage coach to Stagecoach, from horse-drawn conveyors of wealthy merchants to the City in the 18th century to an Enviro400 double-decker of Stagecoach London collecting commuters from Highams Park railway station. From tramway electrification in 1905 to electrification of bus routes 115 years later.
Roger Torode, who has worked in the London bus industry as well as studying it, based this book on a talk he gave to the Friends of the London Transport Museum around a year and a half ago, and has mined many rich seams of photographs and drawings to show not just the different modes and ages of public transport, but in most of them also how ordinary folk used them.
For most of the years that it covers, public transport…
