Great Britain Attractions
London Transport Museum
- Critic's rating
- LAT
Covent Garden Piazza
London, WC2E 7BB
Tel. +44 20 7379-6344 , +44 20 7565-7299 (24-hour information)
Fax. +44 20 7565-7254
The museum once was little more than a graveyard for dusty double-deckers, but the vehicles are now accompanied by etched-glass panels telling the stories of drivers and passengers, and wandering costumed characters promise to bring the rolling stock back to life with tales of what it was like to ride on bi-level horse carriages and smoky subterranean steam trains.
Visitors start their trip to London's transit past on the newly added upper-mezzanine level. Alongside a velvet-lined sedan chair, the kind of conveyance that bustled across the Covent Garden piazza centuries ago, is a full-scale replica of the first London bus from 1824, a flower-painted horse-drawn carriage with pad-free wooden seats. The city was soon crammed with buses like this, carpeting the streets with manure, the vehicle-emission controversy of that day.
wherever it appears.