London has one of the world’s oldest and largest urban transit systems, so there’s obviously a lot for it to show off in the London Transport Museum, but the museum is about a lot more than historic trains, buses and trams.
At the museum’s entrance, another form of London Transport…
As interesting as those are—and I admit to being a rail and transit fanatic with an almost unlimited appetite for transit and railroad museums—a fascinating aspect of the museum is the way it tells the story of how a growing city created a need for new ways to travel and new ways to travel enabled the city to grow even further.
The three pictures above offer a kind of capsule history of how the city changed over two centuries from a walking city that also relied heavily on its river for transport to one with huge numbers of horse-drawn conveyances to today’s mix of modes, with many bumps between.
The museum has a variety of conveyances from the early days of public transit, when people who didn’t own carriages of their own were first able to ‘commute’ to work. Note the huge stables in the photo; it takes a lot of horsepower to move that kind of transit!
By the 20th century, of course, the ‘horses’ were under the hood of gasoline-powered buses that shared the often-crowded streets with electric trams.
While the museum, which first opened in its Covent Garden home, formerly a wholesale flower market, started as mainly a bus-and-subway museum, its focus has shifted to a broader view of getting people around in the city and includes items such as the London taxi above. A 1950’s poster makes the case for riding the bus.
Any urban transit museum is, by nature, a social history museum, a museum of the ways in which we live ordinary life. One aspect of that at the London Transport Museum is the explanation of how the availability, or not, of transit determined where people could live and work. It could relieve overcrowding, or it could keep the poor in their place. London, in 1889, was one of the first cities to coordinate streets, transport and public housing.
Other social issues pop up in exhibits that discuss London’s changing populations in the post-World War II era, including many immigrants from former colonies in the West Indies and India. Starting with the war, many more women were employed in transit as well.
For many visitors, the heart of the exhibits is the famed Underground or Tube trains; London was the first city to have an underground railroad with the opening of a line in 1853 to connect its various rail stations. Because it used steam locomotives, it was only partly in tunnels and mostly in open cuts. The Baker Street station, seen above is still in use and not greatly changed.
Rolling stock has changed a lot over the 170 years of the Underground, although the 1938-vintage train in the top photo above may be familiar to older visitors: it remained in service until 1988, and the similar appearing ‘1959 stock’ continued until 2000.
Interiors varied quite a bit over the years as well, and for many years there were first-class cars for those willing to pay extra not to have to sit with the rest of us. That came to an end in 1940 during World War II.
An exhibit on London’s newest line brings things up-to-date, but without rolling stock; unfortunately, the red 1938-stock train is the most recent train on display in the museum.
London’s Underground played another famous role, as air raid shelters during the Nazi bombing of London. That’s eerily echoed in the museum’s photo, above, of civilians sheltering in the subway in Kyiv, Ukraine, today.
There are spaces set aside for children and family groups, and a wide selection of transit memorabilia, but none so iconic as the museum’s collection of posters intended to increase ridership on the system.
My favorite image from the collection is a cropped version of an 1930 poster advertising the Underground as a way to visit the zoo; in the poster the cages are occupied by a variety of Londoners while the animals watch their antics.
