Postal Museum
A compact, story-rich museum split across two buildings: the main galleries (design, routes, stamps, people) and the Mail Rail depot for the underground train ride. In under two hours you can trace how a single idea—moving information faster—reshaped work, streets and even the city’s underworld. The showpiece is Mail Rail: a 15-minute ride through century-old tunnels where driverless mail trains once ran night and day. Galleries are hands-on (sort a moving mail belt, design a stamp), with a brilliant ‘Sorted!’ play space for under-8s. It’s step-free throughout; the ride itself is snug with a clear claustrophobia warning. Book the train slot first, then wander the galleries at your own pace.
Opening Hours
What's not to miss inside?
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)
Inspire your Friends
- 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.
