🚗 Cars & Transport

Family cars, bus tickets, and the bike everyone wanted for Christmas.

11 things

1950s 1950

Alec Issigonis' small car: cheap, honest, endlessly repairable, and still on the road seventy years later.

🚗 Cars & Transport

1950s 1953

Buses that ran on overhead wires: quiet, fast off the mark, and prone to coming off the poles at junctions.

🚗 Cars & Transport

1960s 1961

Issigonis turned the engine sideways, put the wheels at the corners, and changed small car design permanently.

🚗 Cars & Transport

1960s 1964

A conductor upstairs and down with a leather satchel and a Setright machine that punched your ticket with a clunk.

🚗 Cars & Transport

1960s 1965

Raleigh's answer to the Moulton: a shopper bike with 16-inch wheels and balloon tyres that rode like a sofa.

🚗 Cars & Transport🧸 Toys & Games

1970s 1970

High-back seat, ape-hanger bars, gear lever on the crossbar and a front wheel that lifted if you breathed.

🚗 Cars & Transport🧸 Toys & Games

1970s 1972

Britain's best-selling car, parked outside half the houses on every new estate in the country.

🚗 Cars & Transport

1970s 1976

Peg a playing card against the spokes and your bike made a noise. That was the whole technology.

🧸 Toys & Games🚗 Cars & Transport

1980s 1984

Petrol brands gave away tumblers, coins and football badges to keep families coming back to the same forecourt.

🚗 Cars & Transport📣 Adverts

1990s 1992

The Escort was everywhere, and the modification culture around it (dice, spoilers, sub-woofer) defined a certain kind of British car park.

🚗 Cars & Transport

2000s 2000

Ford replaced Britain's most familiar car with something genuinely modern and it worked immediately.

🚗 Cars & Transport

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