London Transport Museum set to re-open

The London Transport Museum in Covent Garden is set to re-open next week after being closed for two years during a £22million refurbishment and upgrade. The museum’s been based at the old Covent Garden Flower Market building for the last 27 years having started life at a bus garage in Clapham during the 1920s.

The museum’s mission is to preserve and explain the transport history of London and also look at future development. To do this it has extensive collections (currently over 375,000 items) of vehicles, photographs, posters, signs, uniforms and architectural pieces and anything related to the history of transport in London.

Among the vehicles on show are an A class steam locomotive from 1866, a Stephenson horse tram from 1884, a 1911 B-type motor bus and a 1930s electric trolley bus. There are more than 15,000 pictures in the transport photographic collection and 5000 posters and 700 original poster artworks in the poster collection.

Areas in the museum include Art and Design, Suburbia the growth of public transport into the London suburbs, Travel Revolution looks at the impact electricity and petrol engines had on London at the start of the 20th century, the horse and steam power of Victorian Transport and Wartime London looks at transport in the city during World War One and Two. The new museum will also focus on the future by examining how transport is shaping five other major world cities, Delhi, New York, Paris, Shanghai and Tokyo.

The London Transport Museum re-opens on 22 November 2007 and will be open daily from 10am-6pm (11am-9pm Fri). Tickets are £8 adults, under 16s free. The museum is easy to find, located in the southeast corner of Covent Garden Piazza. The nearest Tube is Covent Garden.