Director's Blog - Welcome aboard (again)!
There is so much activity behind the closed doors at our Museum this month as we work towards reopening once more on Monday 17 May 2021. We have been busy upgrading digital screens and projectors in our galleries, bringing fresh digital content to vehicle touchscreens and installing new displays.
Front-of-house colleagues have been working on new bite-size tours of the galleries and preparing for a big welcome back to our visitors. My colleagues and I are very excited about welcoming visitors back to a familiar and much loved museum, even if those big smiles at the front door will be hidden by facemasks! Like you, we can’t wait to get back into the social world of museum operations.
Reopening highlights include the chance to visit our award-winning Hidden London: the Exhibition, extended by popular demand, which gives visitors a vivid experience of London’s disused Tube stations, and the recently refurbished London’s Transport at War gallery. The gallery, which we reopened briefly last autumn, revisits the vital contribution of London’s transport staff to both the First and Second World Wars through key objects and stories from our collection, from Zeppelin attacks and the role of buses and busmen on the Western Front, to the advent of women in the transport workforce and Tube sheltering from the Blitz.
We have also installed a new display, the temporary zebra crossing commissioned by Transport for London’s LGBTQ+ staff group OUTbound for London Pride in 2014, London’s first ever rainbow crossing.
Later in the year, we will explore and celebrate the legacy of transport workers directly recruited by London Transport from the Caribbean from 1956, in a new exhibition.
We will also be displaying a fascinating exhibition, London 2030: Sustainable Cities of the Future, by students from Central Saint Martins who imagined what four localities in London will look like in 2030 after ten years of environmental changes and decarbonisation.
As we come out of the Covid-19 crisis, the response to climate change will be one of the major issues on London transport’s agenda for the next decade, and our programme will focus on this hugely important theme over the coming years. As ever, we seek to demonstrate how transport has shaped the city from the past to the present, and engage our visitors in how it will shape the future.
Finally, look out for a renewed Museum After Dark programme of events for adults starting on 20 May 2021 - a great opportunity to reacquaint yourself with a fun evening out in central London without the crowds.
