London Transport - Country Walks, Third Series, by Charles White, 1937 (Second edition 1939) - dustwrapper or dust jacket.
For many years London Transport and its predecessor companies such as the Metropolitan Railways, along with many other railway and transport undertakings, were avid publishers of such walking guides. Indeed so serious were LT that they actually employed a walks manager to collate the variosu routes and to ensure they were kept up-to-date in the changing world of suburban development around outer London.
The idea was to stimulate off-peak and weekend travel on the services and as this jacket notes the starting (and end) points of all the walks were reached by either Underground, bus or coach services. At the time the London Passenger Transport Board operated a vast network of Underground services along with red 'Central' area, green 'Country' area bus services, Green Line coaches, tram and trolleybus services that spanned not just the current London boundaries but that ran out into neighbouring counties. It was, at a time of low car ownership, marvellous territory for such rambles and indeed, although many of the 'inner' area walks are now less rural, thanks to the Green Belt planning legislation that beginning in the 1930s but accelerated in the post-WW2 years many of the walks described in this booklet are still possible today.
The jacket also describes other LT publications that shared the same design characteristics of this walking guide and included the "Serious Pleasures" series some titles of which are now highly collectable. By the time of this edition of the booklet the Green Line Coach Guide and Underground Timetable books, along with "district" timetables, had undergone a re-design initiated by Christian Barman, the Board's PR manager, and are legible and often delightful works of typographical design.
As well as the typefaces and typography seen here, oddly not of which is in Johnston, the Board's own typeface, is the vignette on the cover. This is by no less than Eric Ravilious who produced the three woodcuts for the three booklets in the series and this, the third, is of two cows in a rural landscape.
London Transport - Country Walks, Third Series, by Charles White, 1937 (Second edition 1939) - dustwrapper or dust jacket.
For many years London Transport and its predecessor companies such as the Metropolitan Railways, along with many other railway and transport undertakings, were avid publishers of such walking guides. Indeed so serious were LT that they actually employed a walks manager to collate the variosu routes and to ensure they were kept up-to-date in the changing world of suburban development around outer London.
The idea was to stimulate off-peak and weekend travel on the services and as this jacket notes the starting (and end) points of all the walks were reached by either Underground, bus or coach services. At the time the London Passenger Transport Board operated a vast network of Underground services along with red 'Central' area, green 'Country' area bus services, Green Line coaches, tram and trolleybus services that spanned not just the current London boundaries but that ran out into neighbouring counties. It was, at a time of low car ownership, marvellous territory for such rambles and indeed, although many of the 'inner' area walks are now less rural, thanks to the Green Belt planning legislation that beginning in the 1930s but accelerated in the post-WW2 years many of the walks described in this booklet are still possible today.
The jacket also describes other LT publications that shared the same design characteristics of this walking guide and included the "Serious Pleasures" series some titles of which are now highly collectable. By the time of this edition of the booklet the Green Line Coach Guide and Underground Timetable books, along with "district" timetables, had undergone a re-design initiated by Christian Barman, the Board's PR manager, and are legible and often delightful works of typographical design.
As well as the typefaces and typography seen here, oddly not of which is in Johnston, the Board's own typeface, is the vignette on the cover. This is by no less than Eric Ravilious who produced the three woodcuts for the three booklets in the series and this, the third, is of two cows in a rural landscape.