⭐ Highligts
Mail Rail Ride
London’s secret postal railway, reborn as a rideFrom 1927 to 2003 a driverless railway rushed letters beneath rush hour. You now glide the same tunnels past platform projections of its 1930s heyday.
📍 Rail Building (opposite main museum), lower level
Penny Black & Friends
The world’s first adhesive postage stamp (1840)A tiny square that democratised long-distance love, business and news—and launched a design language still used today.
📍 Main Museum, Stamp & Design zone
Coach, Postmen & Pillar Boxes
From night-coach speed to street-corner convenienceMail coaches beat turnpikes; pillar boxes turned pavements into post offices. Uniforms and hardware show how public trust was built piece by piece.
📍 Main Museum, Ground floor
War & the GPO
Keeping Britain talking under fireTelegrams, field post and an underground rail kept messages moving through blackouts and Blitz.
📍 Main Museum, People & Stories
Sorted! Play Zone (Kids)
Role-play the whole postal journeyMini-posties scan, sort, load and deliver across a make-believe town—systems thinking disguised as play.
📍 Main Museum (timed sessions)
Opening Hours
🤓 Fun Facts
The ‘secret’ railway wasn’t a Tube at all—it used 2-foot-gauge tracks and ran without drivers decades before the DLR or Elizabeth line automation.
Anthony Trollope, the Victorian novelist, worked for the Post Office and helped champion pillar boxes; your red street icon has literary DNA.
London briefly had blue pillar boxes in the 1930s for airmail—post a letter into a colour-coded shortcut to the skies.
The Colossus code-breaking computers were built by Post Office engineer Tommy Flowers at the GPO’s Dollis Hill lab—Britain’s wartime computing started inside ‘the Post’.
Before Mail Rail, London tried a Victorian underground ‘pneumatic post’ that literally fired canisters through tubes; it worked—until it didn’t—and was scrapped by the 1870s.
