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Local author of Bucks books including The Book of Chesham, and founder of Buckingham Old Gaol Museum Clive Birch MBE has produced his 35th book – A World of Wheels. A 92 year old’s retirement labour of love, this is the story of his family’s pioneering transport company, Birch Bros Ltd., the first firm worldwide to put motor buses on the roads, the first on the first motorway, and one of the first to carry Royal Mails across the country and to run motor cabs in London.

The family originated in Chesham, Bucks, then Devon, and finally the fields of Pimlico named for the printer Tothill, whose 17th century Fleet Street publishing site now hosts Carmen's Hall, instigated by Clive as Senior Past Master Carman.

Past editor of the Bucks Examiner, and later a publisher in Chesham, then Buckingham, he chaired Chesham Theatre Club and its Theatre 21, and his four sons and daughters live in Chesham; he lives just outside Buckingham.

The book is large format, 148 pages hard back with some 200 illustrations and seven chapters, one of over 500 volumes published by Clive's Baron Books imprint. Copies are available from Good Earth Gallery at Lacey's Yard in Chesham.

Clive has written six books on Chesham's past and several on other Bucks sett tlements, including Amersham, Aylesbury, Buckingham and Milton Keynes, as well as the histories of the City of London, of its 500 years of transport, its wheelwrights and also the nation's road haulage, as well as books about future vehicle design.

He was editor and director of The Illustrated London News in the 1970s and visiting tutor in vehicle design at the post-graduate Royal College of Art until 2019.

Bucks author's world of wheels

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