Photos taught bus drivers routes
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ABOUT 90 years ago one of the London bus companies took a series of street photographs to teach drivers their routes, although it might have been even more useful to have shown the pictures to the horses. About 30 years later a repeat exercise illustrated how the metropolis had changed. For one thing, horses had mercifully been replaced by motorbuses.
Both sets of pictures then became buried in London Transport's archives for decades and surfaced only recently for the delectation of people like me — and maybe you.
They are on view at the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden until the end of August. Many of them are also reproduced in The Streets of London, a new book by Benny Green, that irreverent authority on film and theatre music and jazz, and master of the send-up. It is good to be reminded that London had grace and distinction before constructional engineering replaced architecture.