Old buses and a taxi in the museum’s main hall.
Right, so the London Transport Museum is - perhaps predictably - all about transport.
Which is great if you have a small child who loves trains and buses!
Before we get into detail, a quick note about entrance costs: kids are free (yay!) - but adults are £27 each. That’s fairly expensive for what is a smallish museum. There is no cheap single-visit ticket: what you’re buying is an Annual Pass, so that £27 gets you unlimited visits for a whole 12 months. Which means that if you live in London you’re effectively getting a year’s membership and can pop back any time within the year - and if you live in Westminster, Camden or Lambeth there’s even a discounted local-resident rate (£21.60), with proof of address. But if you don’t live in London then all those return visits aren’t much use to you, so you’re really paying £27 for one look round. Whichever pass you buy, you also need a free timed ticket for the day you visit, booked online. There’s also a cheaper Off Peak Annual Pass (£22.50) for weekdays after 2pm in term time and the summer holidays.
So - getting on into the museum:
When we visited, they sent us up in a lift (elevator) - ‘back in time’ - that was darkish (on purpose) and noisyish (again on purpose) as an attempt to build atmosphere - which made it a wee bit scary for small children. (There was another, normal lift (elevator) you could use if your children were the nervous kind.)
So they take you up to the top floor and start you off with the oldest stuff first, which makes a kind of sense. After the very first sedan chair, there’s a collection of horse-drawn buses and trams which are kind of cool and old and interesting. Although conclusively answering the question, “But Daddy, why did they need to be pulled by a horse? Why didn’t they have an engine?” can be a bit tricky.
So then you go down to the middle floor, which has some properly old tube trains - one electric and one steam-powered - and you can sit in the carriage and imagine how dirty the tunnels must have been and all that kind of thing.
Then you go on down to the ground floor which has some more tube (London Underground) trains of varying ages - including one very old one with almost no windows, just a kind of a cylinder with seats - and also down on the ground floor there’s modern buses, and double-decker buses and trams which I guess are too big to fit higher up.
Best bits:
- Driving a modern train: in the Future Engineers gallery on the ground floor you can try driving an Elizabeth line train in a recreated cab (or fixing one).
- Pretending to drive the bus - you can sit in the driver’s seat!
(I enjoyed the simulator - the kids were strangely unimpressed).
- Youngest child (3yo) absolutely loves the pretend pedestrian crossing. It’s real traffic lights, with a countdown timer, but they’re indoors and of course there’s no traffic, so she can press the button herself and then she can - and this is the thrilling part - cross the road by herself! Looking out for the green man and then crossing the ‘road’ by herself! Of her own volition! Without a grown-up holding her hand! So she absolutely adores doing that.
- There’s a play area, All Aboard, for children up to age 7, with mini trains, a Thames riverboat, a cable car and a mini Lost Property office, where they can be drivers, mechanics, cleaners and riverboat captains. There’s a ‘Baby DLR’ for babies too. Again, Youngest Child absolutely adores this.
- Youngest Child loves the modern electric double-decker bus (it’s actually not a whole bus, it’s like a slice of a bus, just the front couple of metres) because you can get into the driver’s seat and pretend to drive it.
- The main toilets, including baby changing, are on the ground floor, and there’s a baby feeding room there too. While the toilets are being refurbished, temporary ones are in World City Walk, just to the left as you come in. The toilets next to the café upstairs have baby changing too.
Then there’s the café (above the shop) and the gift shop. Picnics are welcome in the small indoor picnic area on the ground floor, near the Tuk Tuk cafe.
A couple of special days out connected with the London Transport Museum:
They get out some of the vintage vehicles - e.g. 1930s art deco Tube trains and old buses - and you get to travel in them. You have to book ahead of time, follow the link above.
Three weekends a year (check the link above for dates) they open up the museum’s big depot at Acton (outside central London but easy and quick to get to on the tube). This contains all of the stuff that they don’t have room for in the central London museum, including a bunch of vintage tube trains. And there’s a miniature railway to ride on too (Saturdays and Sundays of the open weekends). The rest of the year you can visit on a pre-booked guided tour, including family tours.
The ordinary Annual Pass doesn’t include the open days, so you have to pay again, but it’s worth it - it’s a nice day out (if you’re into old trains and buses). Or buy the Annual Pass Plus (£75), which gets you and two children into the open days free.
Inside a 1938 Tube carriage, with its patterned seats and hanging straps.
🛜 Free WiFi in the museum café, on the upper floor above the main entrance.
