London Buses In Colour - 1960s

Before London became a place where everyone walks quickly while staring into a glowing rectangle, it was a city where people stared thoughtfully out of bus windows instead — smoking optional, elbows on the sill, the world drifting by in a palette of concrete, shopfronts, and famously determined British weather. London Buses in Colour – 1960s (2000) by Kevin McCormack is your ticket back to that era, when London was modernising at speed and the buses were right there in the thick of it, gamely hauling the city into the future one stop at a time.

This is the 1960s in proper colour — not a hazy “Swinging London” montage with stylish people dancing in Carnaby Street (though you may spot hints of that). This is the everyday, glorious, working London: routes, depots, turning circles, junctions, and streetscapes where the buses are the constant — big, purposeful shapes moving through a city that can’t quite decide whether it’s post-war, ultra-modern, or simply hungry for a cup of tea and a sit down.

McCormack’s photos do that brilliant thing transport books do: they accidentally document everything else. Yes, you’re here for the buses — the models, the liveries, the fleet details, the sheer reassuring bus-ness of it all. But you also get the backgrounds: period adverts, shop signage, street furniture, cars that look like they’ve escaped from a museum, and London corners that have since been redeveloped into something shinier and, arguably, slightly less charming. It’s time travel with a destination board.

And the buses themselves? Majestic. Practical. Slightly stern. They have that London Transport confidence: “We have a job to do and we will do it, even if it rains sideways.” There’s something deeply comforting about seeing those familiar forms in an earlier chapter of their evolution — the design choices, the tiny differences, the sense of a system in motion. This isn’t just nostalgia; it’s a moving archive of how the city actually worked.

Published by Ian Allan (the high church of transport enthusiasm), this book doesn’t require you to already know your Routemasters from your RTs to enjoy it — but it will quietly tempt you into caring. One minute you’re simply admiring a beautifully composed street scene, the next you’re thinking, “Wait… that front looks different,” and suddenly you’re the kind of person who says “livery” with confidence.

Condition: Good — which is exactly right. A book like this shouldn’t feel untouched. It should feel like it’s been appreciated, flipped through, and used as a reliable portal to another London. It’s ready for another reader, another round of page-turning, and another evening spent happily getting lost in photographs of a city where a bus was not just transport — it was part of the landscape.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, because we firmly believe history isn’t only found in museums. Sometimes it’s in a colour photograph of a double-decker at a junction that no longer looks like that, doing a route number that makes you feel strangely sentimental… even if you were never there in the first place.

Keep browsing: See more Transport books Other books by Kevin McCormack