The Hidden London Tour

Especially after our visit to the London Transport Museum a couple of weeks ago and our nearly daily trips on the London Underground, we’ve become increasingly intrigued by this vital aspect of transportation in such a densely populated metropolitan center. To satisfy our growing curiosity we booked ourselves on the Secrets of Central London Walking Tour. Meeting just outside the museum doors we embarked with our guide and three others for an above ground tour highlighting the history of public transportation in London, with other fun bits of interest thrown in, such as how to tell the difference between the iconic K2 and K6 red phone boxes, the history of Covent Garden which was once a monastery, or the Magistrates Court which now houses the Bow Street Police Museum. We learned that horse drawn trams provided the first cheap transport introduced in England by an American, George Francis Train and why the authorities required trams to run underground. Soon thereafter the Metropolitan Railway opened the first section of what is now known as The London Underground from Paddington to Farringdon in 1863. We learned way too much to fit into just one blog post but there’s a couple more tidbits we’d like to share. The British Museum once had its own subway station that closed in 1933 but was used air raid shelter during the Second World War. We learned to recognize the iconic tube stations designed by Leslie Green in the first decade of the 20th Century. And we walked past The Old Curiosity Shop now owned by the London School of Economics. It’s been wonderful adding to our store of trivial and important information that we’ll be talking about for ages to come. Now we’re anxious to book an underground tour.