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We had a family day out to the London Transport Museum. I am hoping to do millions of these as the baby gets older and obviously she’s a bit young to appreciate this kind of stuff on more than a peripheral level at the moment, but it’s good to get the practice in. Because even just ramping up the energy to go out is hard enough, let alone gathering up all stuff you need to take and then getting where you need to go. Especially when we were all a bit tired out. But fuck it. We made the decision to go and look at some old time buses and we were bloody well going to do it. It didn’t matter if none of us enjoyed it. We were doing a dry run in preparation for future days out, where we might manage to enjoy five minutes between the uncontrolled sobbing, temper tantrums and soiled underpants. And that’s just the parents. You thought I meant the child, didn’t you? But it turned out that it was the parents doing all those things, traditionally associated with children. I haven’t lost it.
Obviously it was Saturday in central London and everything was crazy. But the queue to the museum moved reasonably quickly and the institution showed some class as kids under 17 get in for free and the adult tickets are valid for the whole year. Not much use for tourists, but pretty cool for us natives. It meant we could whizz through if we wanted, knowing that we had the option (that admittedly we will probably never use) to return at any point in 2016 and for the first day of 2017.
And we had fun and saw some fun stuff. The lift up to the top floor had a display counting down the years to where we were going and we ended up in 1800. You don’t get time travelling lifts in other museums. But I never got back in and went down again (going down the stairs) so I am stuck back in the olden days. Help me.
We sat on a replica of a nineteenth century horse drawn bus and learned a bit about the bus wars where drivers rushed to pick up passengers. Astonishingly as passenger railways became popular, the people living in the houses that were knocked down to make way for the rails didn’t get any kind of compensation for their loss. Don’t tell our current government. It might give them ideas.
I enjoyed the exhibition about night transport and was surprised to find that night buses only started to really serve west end revellers in the 1980s (before that they were laid on for night time workers). It took me back to my early days in London and travelling home drunk trying to avoid being beaten up or pick someone up in the last chance saloon (never successfully of course). The tube posters of the late 80s and early 90s were spookily familiar. I thought I had forgotten them, but I hadn’t forgotten them. Maybe there’s room for a comedian to remind people of old tube posters from their youth. “It had like a picture of some art from an art gallery on it, remember? And some cartoon people. Who remembers that?” Maybe not. See which ones you recognise here. It's amazing how much money was invested in creating real works of art, even for one off events. They go on forever it seems.
It looks like a great day out for slightly older kids, with lots of interactive things to do and the opportunity to pretend you’re driving a bus, but also interesting for adults to see how much transport in they city has changed over the last two hundred years. I hope to be here in another 200 years to see what they’ve come up with by then. I just need to find the right lift.
I updated the history section of this website. Here's what I got up to in 2015.
