QUAINTNESS OF THE RECENT PAST NO.27

The London Eye opened only in 2000 - really too recent to be the recent past - but those pods...

... always seemed so Dan Dare, so 1950s Futuristic  -  and then, initially c/o Retronaut, I found these wonderful French buses from, yes, 1955:

 

London Eye’s pods were designed by Leitner-Poma of America, an aerial lift manufacturer in Grand Junction, Colorado. But this is the American subsidiary of the French-based Poma, which in turn is owned by the unItalian-sounding Italian company Leitner Technologies. The 1955 buses were designed by Currus, France’s oldest coachbuilder, founded in Paris in 1805, using Citroen's “workhorse” U55 chassis.