SEATS OF LONDON

A Field Guide to London Transport Moquette Patterns

Andrew Martin

REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION

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 fabulously colourful guide to all its patterns.

London Transport has always wanted the best design, whether superb art deco Tube stations, its elegant Johnston typeface or Harry Beck’s Tube map. In the Thirties moquettes were commissioned from major artists like Enid Marx; nowadays every line gets its own unique design.

Andrew Martin’s fascinating and delightful guide to all these patterns, drawing on the London Transport Museum’s comprehensive moquette archive, was first published in 2019, and has sold ever since. It is now reissued in a revised and expanded edition, to include all the beautiful new moquettes TfL has recently been producing.

From the carefully geometric to the wildly floral, the open-top B-type bus to what sailing barges have to do with the new DLR moquette, never mind why cats have favourite moquettes, Seats of London will make you see the capital in a different light.

Andrew Martin is the author of the Jim Stringer series of railway detective novels, as well as Underground Overground and To the Sea by Train. His thriller The Moquette Mystery is also published by Safe Haven.

‘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

May 2026

204pp

£14.99

160 x 160 mm

Paperback

Full colour illustrations throughout

978 1 0685162 3 8

London/Transport/Design