The London Transport Museum has always been ridiculously expensive. The price is right up there with the London Dungeon, Madame Tussauds and a room at The Ritz. They try and make it appear cheaper by letting in the kids for free but then they wallop the parents for fifty quid.
Photo: Craig CrossThe exhibition begins upstairs with a couple of horse-drawn carriages and those early buses that trundle through the town in Downton Abbey. The waxwork passengers all look like Sherlock Holmes and Mary Poppins in their top hats, monocles and flowery bonnets, but sadly they don’t let you climb upstairs to join them because these wooden buses have staircases steeper than the Eiger. Even Edmund Hillary would struggle to get onboard these things.
Photo: Craig CrossLocomotives & London Underground tube trains
Photo: Craig CrossAs you make your way down to the next level you start to hear the sound of a steam locomotive chugging and puffing through the speakers and then you round a corner and see it sitting on a siding: a chestnut coloured carriage from 1866, looking like something off the Orient Express.
Photo: Craig CrossTrain travel was certainly a lot more luxurious in those days and if you poke your nose through the wound-down window you can see padded sofa seats, hat racks and lampshades. Even their plain old tube train from the 1930s looks a little bit nicer, a little more comfy, and a little more ornate than today’s plasticised interiors.
Black taxi cabs & Routemaster buses
Photo: Craig CrossThe ground floor is more of a garage with black cabs and double-decker buses. This is where the nostalgia really kicks in because you’ll recognise these vehicles from your youth.
If you want to board a bus nowadays then you just beep a bank card onto a reader and that’s it, that’s all the interaction that we have, but back in the 1980s we had to hand a pocketful of coins to the conductor as he stalked up and down the aisle cranking paper tickets out of his machine, then we’d hop off the open platform at the back (straight into a puddle) before it slowed to a stop.
Photo: Craig CrossThat’s the best thing about this museum: you come away remembering all the things you did as a kid. Tourists won’t have the same memories as Londoners so maybe it’s a wasted day for them.
And I don’t think it’s all that great for kids either because apart from climbing up the stairs on the Routemaster and taking a look inside the tube train they’re not allowed inside any of the vehicles. They’ll just spend an hour walking round at head-height to the wheels.
If you enjoy this then try Science Museum (take a tube journey from Covent Garden to South Kensington). How about riding around on a bus instead? The best sightseeing buses in London are the Tootbus and Big Bus Tour. The number 26 bus is a cheap alternative. You can also ride one of the old heritage buses
The author Craig Cross owns city-guide.london and has spent the last decade reviewing the capital’s landmarks, attractions and hotels. His guidebook London Squire is available from Amazon. This review was updated on
Your comments and questions
Ken We took the grandkids along for the day and they thoroughly enjoyed it. The price was a bit eye-watering mind you, but what do you expect in London, everything is expensive. This is the kind of museum that grandparents can enjoy too, and I think we probably enjoyed it more because it bought back a few memories of how things used to be. But there is plenty of things to climb on for the kids. They can go in all the buses and trains and climb up to the top deck. I forgot how steep those stairs were.
karen Can you actually go inside the buses and trains, we have a six year old boy who loves trains
Craig Hi Karen. You can go in quite a few of them. You can look inside the old and modern buses, and go upstairs on the rickety old wooden buses. You can also step inside the carriages for the old tube trains. You can't go all the way inside and sit down, though, You just go through the doors and then look down the length of the buses and train carriages.
wil Hello. Do they have any model railways on display?
Craig Hi Wil. Not that I recall, no. They just have full size trains and carriages.
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