Greater Manchester Transport

Greater Manchester Transport Vol 1

Great change was afoot for Manchester’s buses in the 1970s. The region’s long-established municipal bus companies, the largest of which was Manchester City Transport, had already been enfolded into South East Lancashire North East Cheshire (SELNEC) Passenger Transport Executive, which had been established under the Transport Act 1968 – but further change was still to come.

A new orange and white livery gradually replaced the colours of its predecessors, and a standard bus was developed that took design cues from the iconic Mancunian body and applied them to subsequent deliveries of Leyland Atlanteans and Daimler Fleetlines that arrived in large numbers over the rest of the 1970s. When the metropolitan counties were created on 1 April 1974, SELNEC was renamed Greater Manchester PTE (GMPTE), or Greater Manchester Transport (GMT) for short.

Studying in Manchester during the middle of the decade, Jim Collins was ideally placed to observe and photograph the rapid structural change applying to his local bus routes and those in Greater Manchester as a whole, while taking into account the city’s socio-economic conditions that warranted such bus provision.

His prolific and high-quality photographic output during that time forms the basis of this book, the first of a forthcoming series that tells the story of public transport in this vibrant and ever-changing city.

Hardback, 224 pages