Like any metropolis, London could not function without its public transport system, the history of which has long been commemorated, celebrated, and more recently analyzed through its material culture. The present collection at the London Transport Museum dates back to the 1920s, although it was 1980 before the museum moved to its present site in Covent Garden, right in the heart of what has become one of London’s hottest tourist spots. Ever since, the London Transport Museum can rightly claim to be one of the world’s finest museums of urban transport (fig. 1).

Exterior view of the London Transport Museum. (Source: author photograph, taken with the permission of the London Transport Museum.)

The museum has always been committed to the history of urban transport beyond vehicles. The initial suite of exhibitions sketched the role played by transport in shaping the physical form of, and life in, the metropolis. But this interpretation was not tied in with the vehicles that dominated the displays. A redisplay in 1993–94 gave a much greater emphasis to transport as a factor in urban history. But there was still a tension between the museum’s illustrated narrative of the social, political, and economic history of mobility in London and the displays of trams, buses, and Underground vehicles conveying a rather conventional notion of technological progress.1 By contrast, the present museum, opened in November 2007 after a closure of just over two years, marks a substantial step toward integrating the material remains of London’s public transport with a technocultural history of personal mobility in the city. It also relates that history to debates about how London’s transport might develop in a future dominated by climate change.2

The museum’s legally protected Victorian market building, with its light, airy, cast-iron and glass structure, was both an attraction in its own right and a nightmare for the museum’s exhibition designers and conservationists. Ameliorating some of the worst environmental deficiencies without destroying the amenities was a priority for the refurbishment, swallowing around 80 percent of the project’s £22.5 million ($45 million) cost. A rationalization of the museum’s ancillary services, with the entrance, shop, café, and a new 100-seat lecture theater now located in an annex, leaves the main hall with two upper levels free for displays and a small library, open to both browsers and scholars. The result is a much-needed additional gallery, easier circulation, and splendid views of both the full height of the Victorian structure and, from the upper galleries, an impressive selection of road vehicles on the ground floor.

The success of any exhibition needs to be judged partly against its target audiences, in this case visitors who do not have a historical knowledge of either London or its transport. The old museum was good at attracting family groups, with well over half of the annual visitation just before closure (200,000) falling into this category, split roughly equally between the sexes. The new displays seek to retain these audiences while also reaching out to a new demographic—people, particularly those in their twenties and thirties, who are interested in art and design. Here London Transport’s long and well-deserved reputation as a world leader in industrial and graphic design offers considerable opportunities to build on the tentative start the old museum had made in this direction.3 On the other hand, those with a strong interest in technical details will be disappointed that the museum does not provide these as part of its main displays; research suggested a low demand, and such information is available chiefly in the library. By contrast, children are seen as a key audience, and considerable thought has gone into making exhibits accessible to them throughout by tailoring interpretative content and presenting it at appropriate heights (fig. 2). But this is equally a museum for adults, albeit not one aimed in its main galleries primarily at the specialist or the scholar.

The new forms of interpretation at the London Transport Museum appeal to children.(Source: author photograph, taken with the permission of the London Transport Museum.)

The museum presents London as a metropolis whose world-class status over the last two centuries owes much to its transport systems, public and private. This aim reflects the priorities of the new body, Transport for London, which took over London Transport, and hence the museum, in 2000, providing around £9 million of the funding. Although the museum now treats all of London’s passenger transport since roughly 1800, public transport still dominates visually. There are fewer (twenty-five) vehicles on display than before, although the total number of objects is up from some four hundred to more than a thousand. While vehicles can all too easily overwhelm other aspects of exhibitions, they remain powerful attractors for many visitors, especially when it is possible to board the interiors in a controlled manner as is the case with many here. Inevitably, given the different stories that can be told with a particular vehicle, there are hard choices to be made over which to exclude, and old favorites now gone can usually be found in the museum’s warehouse at Acton in the far-western suburbs. This is open to the public on a handful of occasions each year.

How well does the museum shape up to its mission to interpret London’s transport as a vital aspect of everyday life, historically, now, and in the future? Pretty well in general, although inevitably some elements work better than others.

The visit is a semi-directed one. Once past the turnstile—the fairly substantial entrance charge is partly there to control demand—visitors go up to the highest gallery and then work their way down to the ground level, ideally through both upper galleries, although it is possible to cut out the one on the middle floor. The narrative interpretation in the first of these upper spaces is nicely done, the gallery’s linearity lending itself to a chronological treatment of transport’s influence on London’s growth during the nineteenth century. Four themes are treated (literally) in parallel: the River Thames as both a facilitator of and barrier to mobility, the growth and impact of London’s suburban railway network, the place of street transport, and an overview of the city’s changing morphology. It is easy enough physically to weave between these narratives, which are told through the range of visual, tactile, and aural media one expects these days, and to make connections between them. I have no serious quibble with any of the interpretations, given the constraints of space and the intended audiences. Technological alternatives are given some notice, serious efforts are made to contextualize technological change in social and economic terms, and generally speaking the interpretation avoids any implication that, important though it was, transport was singlehandedly responsible for London’s development.

The world’s first Underground continues to appeal to a wide audience. (Source: author photograph, taken with the permission of the London Transport Museum.)

There is the old challenge of most visitors gravitating to the vehicles, which here are horse-drawn buses and trams (plus a sedan chair right at the start) arranged chronologically, and ignoring much of what else is on offer. Whether visitors come away with anything other than a vague idea that one technology supersedes another remains to be discovered, but the freedom to pick and choose is at the heart of all museum visiting and informal learning. In any case this emphasis on the horse, a topic only quite recently taken seriously by historians of urban mobility, is very welcome. And there is much I liked about the way the individual vehicles are treated, not least the fact that they are now fully integrated into the overarching story. Associated with each is a panel narrating a snippet of the life story of an individual, usually a worker, associated with the vehicle; a ghostly photograph of the person helps to convey an impression of times past that is conspicuously denied by the patina of the restored vehicles. Touch-sensitive labels offer a choice of information for each vehicle, addressing the design and development of its type, the service of that particular example, and the kinds of journeys for which it was used. Words, photos, and occasionally film all have a role here, sometimes intriguing in the possibilities they suggest for academic research.

Mannequins suggest the long service life of Underground trains. (Source: author photograph, taken with the permission of the London Transport Museum.)

The next gallery down, also linear, focuses on the Underground and the spread of London’s suburbs, with a small selection of locomotives, steam and electric, complemented by passenger accommodation (figs. 3 and 4). Essentially the same mix of multimedia interpretation and vehicular access is used here, and again there is little to argue with in terms of historiographical perspective. Very occasionally a hint of technological determinism creeps into the graphic panels (“Public transport creates suburbs”), but equally the attentive visitor will note the suggestions that the expansion of mobility and the provision of transport infrastructure and services were coconstructed. Some neat touches bring vehicles to life and emphasize the longevity of railway equipment. Inside the famous 1938 Underground cars, for example, the alert visitor will notice that the fashions of the “passengers” boarding and alighting the train in a life-size film projected on the end wall change as the decades roll by—it was 1988 before the last of these cars disappeared (fig. 4). And the gendered nature of mobility, a notable absence in the old displays, now receives some mention, as, for example, with the “ladies only” compartment of the Metropolitan Railway coach occupied by two women “off to town.”

By the time they reach ground level visitors have thus had the opportunity to think about London’s transport from several perspectives and through a variety of media. Now they are faced with a mix of further historically orientated spaces, with no clear path through them until they head for the exit and some exhibits about the future. However, the theme of each part of the ground floor is signaled clearly enough once one reaches it. In addition to single examples of an electric tram and trolleybus there are several motor buses, including the iconic red Routemaster double-decker, withdrawn from ordinary service in 2005 after nearly fifty years (fig. 5). There are also further exhibits relating to the Underground, including welcome displays on the hidden technologies of tunneling techniques and the escalator, an American invention transforming access to the deep-level “Tube” stations from 1911. There are also taxis, motorized successors to the personalized mobility afforded by the sedan chair displayed upstairs, and a bicycle—a much-needed, if understated, reminder that technological mobility is not just about mechanical power.

Key vehicles tell the story of changing street transportation. (Source: author photograph, taken with the permission of the London Transport Museum.)

Because they are physically discrete, it is easier to locate the galleries dedicated to London Transport’s contribution to industrial and graphic design from the 1930s and to the experience of the system in both world wars. The former is particularly striking, with a continuous large-scale projection of key posters and other design features, including the Underground map, making the point that the automobile was not the only kind of mobility to benefit from sophisticated cultural work.

All this is nicely done, and although I might quibble here and there about the detail of interpretation, there is much to engage the historian of technology as well as the more casual visitor. The one clear disappointment was toward the exit, where the present and future of London’s transport come under the spotlight. The principle is excellent—encouraging visitors to think about future possibilities in the light of the past. At the display’s core is the imperative of addressing climate change, requiring hard thinking about how much and what kind of urban mobility we can afford. Public transport is presented as a key to both sustainable mobility and urban regeneration. The overall tone is perhaps a little too didactic to be truly engaging, but there are opportunities to reflect on different scenarios for the future, depending on how strictly and by what means carbon emissions are controlled. Technological possibilities are given some emphasis, but rather too much space is given over to exhibits mounted by various of the museum’s commercial sponsors. They are marked as such, and to a media-savvy generation perhaps it is no great hardship to interpret their content in this light. But while I acknowledge the need for commercial money, I feel that this level of influence over content is unacceptable in any museum, not least because it radically diminishes exhibitors’ freedom to treat topics from a disinterested perspective. For example, the advertisement—for this is all it amounts to—for “The pursuit of the ultimate eco-car” by a well-known manufacturer does not address the concern that hybrid drives might, under some full-life cycles, cost more in carbon terms than a conventional auto. However, this whole section has a limited life; it will be interesting to see how it is replaced.

There is a very great deal that is excellent or good about the new London Transport Museum, keeping it in the first rank of transport museums around the globe. The new displays do a good job in broadening the historical remit, comprehending transport as an important factor in the social and spatial development of this world city. Vehicles remain the stars of the show, as they always will be, but they are much better integrated into the overall stories than in the museum’s previous incarnations. The interpretation nicely contextualizes the vehicles as both places of work and spaces of consumption, and there is much to delight specialist and lay visitor alike about the wider history of mobility in London.

1. Colin Divall, “Changing Routes? The New London Transport Museum,” Technology and Culture 36 (1995): 630–35.

2. London Transport Museum website: (accessed 16 May 2008).

3. One result is a most welcome addition to the new website—a searchable collection of over 5,000 advertising posters and 700 pieces of original poster artwork. Equally invaluable to the historian as well as the casual viewer is a selection of some 15,000 black-and-white photographs (roughly 10 percent of the collection), some dating from the 1860s. See and (both accessed 16 May 2008).

Colin Divall is head of the Institute of Railway Studies and Transport History, a joint initiative of the National Railway Museum and the University of York, UK. He is the author, with Andrew Scott, of Making Histories in Transport Museums (London and New York, 2001). He thanks Oliver Green, head curator at the London Transport Museum, for arranging his visit and discussing the project’s background, philosophy, and challenges. The views expressed here are the author’s alone.

Copyright© 2008, the Society for the History of Technology