London Transport Museum Re-opens

After a two year closure and investment of £22.4 million, the London Transport Museum re-opens on the 22nd November. As it's not a million miles away from where I work, I'm sure I'll be dropping in to see what's what. We're promised state-of-the-art recreations, interactives and stunning exhibits. There's an extra floor, more space on the ground floor and a newly constructed basement theatre.


I'm most interested in the promise of transport related cocktails on the Upper Deck café bar. You can lounge around on Northern Line upholstered seats and sip the tantalisingly named The Anorak & Metropolitan Mixture drinks. One can only guess what delights they might hold. I'd imagine The Anorak is made out of cold tea. The Metropolitan Mixture was initially a medicine devised by a pharmacist in Gower Street in 1879 "to ease the plight of persons emerging in distress from the nearby station". Victorian Londoners clearly needed to recover from the early steaming and smoking underground tunnels. So perhaps this cocktail will have a medicinal "pick-me-up" kick to it.

The museum sounds like it's getting very 21st century and is already embracing of Web 2.0 marketing tactics. Apparently they used Facebook to get video clips of commuters' journeys from five ‘global cities’ – New York, Paris, Delhi, Shanghai and Tokyo. Not quite sure why London wasn't included - perhaps no one wanted to watch exhibits of crowded carriages with everyone looking miserable.

The museum also has its own Flickr set and was kind enough to add me as a friend a few weeks ago.

In the "Mystery Objects set" I found the rather strange device above, which they are asking people to guess what it might be. The only clue is that it's from 1990 and I only hope it's not as fetishy as it looks.

Feel free to make a guess in the comments below. Plus if you visit the museum it would be interesting to hear your thoughts. It's always been swarming with kids whenever I've gone in the past and if I went as an adult on my own, I used to feel a bit uncomfortable, but with a few Anorak cocktails inside me, I'd probably be beyond caring.

Update 22nd November - Mike from Trusted Places has written post based on his trip on the morning it opened with some good shots on Flickr.

London Underground; Tube Posted by annie mole Wednesday, November 21, 2007 Permalink COMMENT HERE
Tweet http://london-underground.blogspot.com/2007/11/london-transport-museum-re-opens.html