London Transport Museum’s Ruby Anniversary

London Transport Museum is turning 40 years old in March 2020!

To celebrate its ruby anniversary, we’re taking a brief look at the origins of the Museum and its collection. We are also reliving the first days of operations through the first-hand memories of former members of staff, starting with Mike Walton, who was working in the Museum shop when it opened on 28 March 1980.

Our collection counts over 500,000 items, from heritage vehicles to signs and maps, posters and ephemera that document 200 years of London’s transport and social history . But it all started with two Victorian horse buses and an early motorbus. In the 1920s, the London General Omnibus Company (LGOC) decided to preserve these vehicles for future generations to enjoy.

Horse bus c.1875

In the 1960s, our growing collection was housed in an old bus garage in Clapham, south London, and referred to as the Museum of British Transport. In 1973 it was moved to Syon Park, west London, taking the name of London Transport Collection. Between 1979-80, the public display moved to its current home, the old Victorian Flower Market, a Graded II-listed building in Covent Garden. London Transport Museum as we now know it was born!

The old Victorian Flower Market in Covent Garden

The Museum was officially inaugurated by Princess Anne on 28 March 1980, and opened its doors to the public the following day.  Mike Walton, Poster Art Commissioner for Transport for London and London Transport Museum, recalls:

“Prior to the Royal Opening on 28 March, work to prepare became increasingly frantic. Staff were recruited, or better transferred from other teams within London Transport, and the shop was filled with many products from London Transport’s Publicity Office which was simultaneously closing its long-established retail outlets.

On the day of the opening all Retail and Admission staff lined up in the shop area as Princess Anne and London Transport Officials arrived and toured the Museum. I disgraced myself by curtsying to Princess Anne by accident much to her amusement. The assembled officials were less amused!

Princess Anne and London Transport officials at the Royal Opening of the Museum

The day went very smoothly and was deemed a great success, but the official event left us with little time to prepare for the public opening the following day. The Museum opened its doors to its first visitors at 10:00 on Saturday 29 March 1980. Unsurprisingly, the queues around Covent Garden Piazza lasted all day. An Adult ticket cost £1.40 with various discounted tickets available for children, students and pensioners.

The tickets were dispensed from an old Underground ‘rapiprinter’ and customers passed through a then standard Underground automatic ticket gate, a system which caused much unreliability for staff and considerable confusion for customers. Our supposed plentiful supply of change had run out by midday and someone was delegated to tour local Tube stations begging for spare change!

At the end of the first enormously successful day’s trading, cashing up had to take place. With endless piles of £1 notes, no credit cards and no counting machines, the task was completed at 23:00. My working life had changed for ever!”

Celebrate the Museum’s 40th birthday throughout the month of March 2020 with us. Share your fondest memories of the Museum on social media with the hashtag #LTMLove.

New discoveries at Clapham South’s deep-level shelter

Siddy Holloway, Hidden London Engagement Manager

At the southern end of Clapham Common stands a rather peculiar, circular structure that many Londoners walk past every day without thinking much of. Very few people would know it to be the entrance to a Second World War bomb shelter located beneath the Northern line, but that is precisely what it is.

The entrance to Clapham South’s subterranean shelter, 2018

Clapham South’s deep-level shelter totals over a mile of tunnels and has had an incredibly varied life: originally opened as a wartime shelter in 1944, it was turned into temporary accommodation for thousands of people coming to Britain to visit or live after the Second World War, and it’s now one of our Hidden London sites.

When the Hidden London team first visited the shelter with the aim of doing tours there, it had recently been an archive and racking was covering the walls of the entire site, stretching for over a mile. We cleared most of the racking and started to run tours in 2015.

Archive racking along the walls of the shelter.

The shelter itself is divided into 16 sub-shelters, all named alphabetically to help those who stayed there to remember where in the colossal structure they were bedding down for the night. Every sub-shelter had been used for archive purposes and the original bunk beds in the shelter were converted to archive racking by raising the top bunks up slightly.

Bunk beds converted into archive racking.

While designing the tours back in 2015, we decided that we would take people into seven of the 16 sub-shelters, so that visitors would get a good sense of the place without having to walk for over a mile. We focused on the selected shelters, clearing them up and getting them back to their authentic state, but that meant that the other nine shelters were left largely untouched, awaiting the day we would have the capacity to explore the shelter further.

An original wayfinding sign in Clapham South directing visitors to different parts of the shelter. Each sub-shelter was named in alphabetical order.

Over the last two years, we have had the opportunity to start clearing out the remaining racking in the shelter and what we found was astounding: hundreds of different messages written on the walls of the shelter by people who had stayed there between 1944-1953. Everything from names and addresses, to the purpose of their visit, and even a few love letters, were all unveiled when we cleared away the racking.

The history of the shelter written on its walls.

These messages and notes have helped us fill in the gaps in our knowledge of the people who came to stay in the shelter after the Second World War. We knew the shelter had been used as a hostel for Windrush migrants in 1948 and for visitors of the Festival of Britain in 1951, but discovering these graffiti really highlighted the role that Clapham South had played in London’s history during and after the War.

Due to the devastation of the Second World War, with over a million homes destroyed or damaged, anyone looking for accommodation in the Capital had very few options available, and that’s where Clapham South came to use. The shelter housed thousands of people during the War, but even more after it, providing a haven for those who needed it, whilst the country was being rebuilt.

The central staircase in Clapham South c. 1942. Since the 1960 that staircase had been filled with racking for the storage of archival materials.

Although the areas we recently cleared are not accessible to the public just yet, removing the archive racking has also restored the main staircase to its former grandeur, to the delight of visitors of the Hidden London tour of Clapham South: Subterranean shelter.

Visit our website for more information about the tour and to book.

Exploring London’s Signs and Symbols

By Stephanie O’Neill-Winbow, Family Learning Officer

It feels like Christmas was just here, but already it’s February half term! If you’re looking for somewhere fun to play and explore during this school holiday, visit the Museum from 15 to 23 February.

We’ve got something very special planned for you:  we are sending you and your family on a mission to explore our galleries and discover the signs and symbols that make London’s transport system the most recognisable in the world. It’s amazing to see how even the littlest of children are able to recognise the roundel as the symbol for the Underground. We’ll be celebrating these visual, familiar and accessible areas of transport through dressing up, role play, object handling, colouring in and problem solving.

In the Transportorium on the ground floor, families will be able to take part in fun games – think party games with a transport twist: you have probably played Simon Says before, but what about the ‘Sign Says’? We’ll also be playing Bingo with symbols instead of numbers. We promise it’ll be quite the laugh! These Transport Games will be running six times a day, every day from 10:45 for about 20 minutes each, so there’s plenty of opportunities for families to join in.

All Aboard play zone

Alongside these special activities, we have our two dedicated All Aboard play zones for children under 7, and our big red buses, trains and a tram that you can climb aboard. Our Customer Service team are friendly, helpful and always ready to share lots of knowledge about the history of London’s transport.  There’s also our Hidden London exhibition, an engaging and exciting glimpse of what goes on underground in London, particularly appealing to older children and adults in your family group.

Hidden London: the Exhibition

As usual for each of our school holidays, we will also run an Explorer Event for families with children with additional needs, on Saturday 22 February from 8:30 to 10:00. During this time, half term activities will be available while all the sounds around the galleries are turned off or turned down, and extra sensory resources are available. If this sounds like the right event for your family to visit the Museum, do make sure to book your place here.

February half term is a busy and energetic time for the Museum – every year we are so lucky that lots of lovely families choose to pay us a visit. This time around, we’re hoping to welcome even more of you!

Museum Late: Night on the tiles

Our Museum Late: Night on the tiles is all about the history of London’s rich nightlife from Victorian music halls and night clubs, to subcultures which have influenced London and the world. Guests can party like the Victorians with Lee Jackson of Victorian London, explore LGBTQI nightlife spaces with Ben Walters of Not Television, and get crafty at workshops with artist Nick Murray and creative producer Christina Tubb.

The Museum of Youth Culture will also be joining us to talk about their latest collecting project, Grown Up In Britain. The museum is a non-profit collection of over 100,000 photographs, ephemera and objects celebrating 100 years of being young in the UK.

Lisa Der Weduwe, Cultural Projects Assistant at the Museum of Youth Culture said:

Everyone has stories about being young and their experiences growing up, from first loves to school days, and the events that shaped who we are today. The Museum of Youth Culture is working to pull together all these incredible stories and build a picture of what it was like growing up in Britain over the last 100 years. 

Launched in November 2019, Grown Up In Britain is a crowd-sourced project that asks a simple question – show us your youth. Whether you have one photograph, some flyers from your favourite gigs or an amazing story to tell, we want you to be part of the Museum of Youth Culture. 

You can submit your photographs and ephemera here.

A small selection of photographs from the Museum of Youth Culture’s collection.

The Museum of Youth Culture team and our Documentary Curators will be welcoming you at our Museum Late and be on hand to show you some of the items in the Museum of Youth Culture’s collection, and to collect your stories of going out in London and travelling on the night bus or night Tube.

We invite you to bring an item or photo that reminds you of a special night out to show and tell, and celebrate our history together.

Visit our website to see the programme highlights and to book your tickets to our Museum Late: Night on the tiles on 28 February 2020