A LONDON LOCOSPOTTER REFLECTS

Entertaining story of one man’s ‘Glorious Years’. Little except the picture quality.

For a Lancashire lad with an interest in buses and trams, a move to London in 1949 opened up new horizons, led to new friendships and a new hobby: locospotting. In a well-written account, Geoff Bannister tells how he went on to travel not only across the capital, but the length of the country, in his new-found quest to seek out ‘cops’. Some of his exploits along the way are good for a chuckle, especially – in the light of recent tales involving Old Oak Common – his own rather ironic experience of being chucked out of 81A. In spite of Photoshop, none of the pictures are top quality, but that’s because they were taken on the typical spotter’s cameras and slower films of the day. Rather like the other Londonrelated book received for review (see left) it is not, in all honesty, anything out of the ordinary as books of 1950s spotting memories go – yet I enjoyed its absorbing story of how one young enthusiast discovered a lifelong hobby.