This past weekend, I made the trip into London to meet up with one of my penpals to visit the Postal Museum. I thought I would share my experience of the mail rail and the museum itself.
The museum is located in Central London, not far from Chancery Lane and Farringdon Station. I couldn’t find any signs leading up to it, so it was a little confusing to find at first before seeing the large letters MAIL RAIL on a building.
The museum’s website suggests that when you purchase tickets, the time listed is for when you should be in the queue for the mail rail and then you can spend the time looking at the exhibitions across the street afterwards. Our time was set for 2:30pm, but we didn’t end up boarding the mail rail until 20 minutes after the scheduled time.
The mail rail takes about 15 minutes as you ride around on the old underground railway. Despite it being warm and cramped, I still enjoyed looking around at the tunnels, seeing the old mail trains, and watching the videos projected onto the platforms that talked about the history behind the mail rail.
After the ride, we walked across the street to the building where the postal museum exhibitions are held. There was an exhibition with artefacts describing Royal Mail’s history and an exhibition on the history of slaves in the Caribbean – both very interesting with lots to read and look at. I liked seeing the different types of mail transport through the years and learning more about older postage here in the UK.
In total, I think we spent about an hour and half for doing the mail rail and the exhibitions. We kind of skipped around where there were a bunch of children. The gift shops had some lovely items to pick from, but I only bought some postcards. I know you used to be able to buy stamps there to then send off, but they don’t do that anymore. A big shame as I would’ve loved to send some postal museum postcards to other penpals directly from the museum!
Tickets for adults (25+) are £18.50 each – a bit pricey, but they are annual tickets. I think it is a good place to visit if you have an interest in stamps, the history of Royal Mail, want to meet up with a penpal, or want to try out something different like riding on the mail rail. If you don’t have any big interest in these things and don’t plan on visiting again within a year, I’d give it a pass.
xx Hannah
Idealistic Iowan 