Ride the Tunnels of the World's First Driverless Electric Railway
You descend below Phoenix Place, beneath the vast Mount Pleasant sorting office in Clerkenwell, and the temperature drops. What you're standing in is a stretch of London's Mail Rail — the world's first driverless electric railway — and the Postal Museum has opened up roughly a kilometre of its original tunnels and station platforms to the public. You board a train and travel through the same underground passages that once carried the mail across the city, an experience that no other museum in London can offer. It is the centrepiece of a visit, and the reason many travellers come at all.
Come Face to Face with the Penny Black and a Victorian Valentine
Back up in the museum proper, the collection spans more than 500 years of British postal history, from the 16th century — when Henry VIII sought a network for his court — through to the present day. Tens of thousands of objects and millions of stamps are held here. Among the things you can see: the rare Penny Black, the world's first adhesive postage stamp, and a selection of Victorian Valentine cards.
The displays are not all behind glass. You can play a mail coach game in which you fend off highwaymen, and try your hand at pneumatic canister messaging — a hands-on way to understand how the postal network actually moved things. The museum also stages permanent collections alongside temporary exhibitions, so there is usually something new alongside the fixtures.
Objects That Tell Stranger Stories
The museum's holdings reward a slow look. Among the anticipated attractions in the museum section are a commemorative stamp that would have been used had Scotland won the 1978 FIFA World Cup, telegrams from the night that the Titanic sank, the childhood stamp album of Freddie Mercury, and an intercepted first edition of Ulysses — a book banned in the United Kingdom until 1936. Each object is a small window into the way the post touched ordinary and extraordinary lives alike.
A Museum with Three Sites — and a Clerkenwell Setting
The Postal Museum you visit in London is run by the Postal Heritage Trust and opened in Central London under its current name on 28 July 2017. It sits at Phoenix Place, near the Mount Pleasant sorting office in Clerkenwell — a part of the city with its own working character, and a natural fit for a museum about the mail.
The organisation also operates two other sites: a museum store in Loughton, Essex, and The Museum of the Post Office in the Community, located about the post office in Blists Hill Victorian Town, Shropshire. The London museum is the main draw, but the wider network is worth knowing about if you follow postal history further.
Plan Your Visit Around the Archive
The Postal Museum is an independent charity, strongly linked with Royal Mail Group, and it manages the Royal Mail archive — records that have been given official designated status as nationally important and are available to researchers to consult. If you have a research interest, that access is part of what the museum offers, not separate from it. Current employees of either Royal Mail or the Post Office are granted a reduced admission fee to both general admission and most special events.
Start by picking a date, checking what's on, and building your day around the Mail Rail ride and the museum galleries. Clerkenwell is well placed for the rest of central London, so you can pair the visit with the wider city. Go for the tunnels, stay for the Penny Black, and leave with a sense of how the post shaped the city above your head.