SEATS OF LONDON

A Field Guide to London Transport Moquette Patterns

Andrew Martin

Moquette is the carpet-like fabric covering the seats we sit on in London’s Tubes, buses, trams and Overground trains – and here is a brilliantly colourful guide to all its patterns.

London Transport has always wanted the best design, be it Charles Holden’s superb art deco Tube stations on the Piccadilly Line or Harry Beck’s Tube map.

And this pursuit of excellence has extended even to moquette. In the Thirties top artists like Paul Nash and Enid Marx were commissioned to design patterns; nowadays every line like Crossrail or the Overground gets its own bespoke pattern.

Now, published in association with the London Transport Museum, and drawing on its definitive moquette archive, Andrew Martin has written a delightful, surprising and covetable guide to all these patterns and their history, from the first horse bus to the latest Tube train, and covering everything from the possible influence of Margot Fonteyn’s luggage on a Routemaster’s seats to the moquette pattern most preferred by cats.

Andrew Martin is the author of the bestselling history of the Tube, Underground, Overground, as well as Belles and Whistles, Night Trains and the Jim Stringer series of railway crime novels. He lives in north London.

ISBN 978 1 9160453 1 6
192pp
160 x 160 mm
paperback

‘A wittily written book’, Twentieth-Century Society magazine

’A little gem of a book and, as its title suggests, is intended to be used much like a wildlife field guide. I recommend this book as a charming introduction to railway design’, Text, the journal of the Textile Society

’A delightful book on an intriguing facet of London Transport - a fascinating niche, and I found it much more compelling than, say, rivet-counting on Josher-bowed narrowboats or valve gear on GWR locomotives. All in all, Andrew Martin has written an intriguing book that has opened up a facet of London's transport to a wider audience and he easily succeeds in hitting his sitting target,’ Subterranea

The London Transport Museum added a range of rather eyecatching moquette-pattern facemasks in its online shop, and a box of socks in six vintage moquette patterns that will be familiar to any reader of this book: