The Postal Museum

14 November 2025

For the majority of the seven years I worked for Making Music our office was in Rosebery Avenue in London, just a few hundred yards from the massive Royal Mail Mount Pleasant Sorting Office. Despite walking past the building every day it was only last weekend, more than 20 years later, that I got around to visiting the Postal Museum. The museum houses a fascinating and entertaining exhibition which walks you through the history of the UK postal service - from 1516 when Henry VIII established a ‘Master of the Posts’ to the present day. I realised I have now reached an age when I spend too much of my time in museums exclaiming “I remember having one of those”! But the main attraction at the Postal Museum is the opportunity to ride in the tiny Mail Rail train under central London. London's Hidden Postal Railway runs for 6.5 miles from Paddington to Whitechapel. It opened in 1927 and only ceased being used in 2003. Now you can squeeze into new passenger carriages and travel around one loop of the railway line, passing through narrow tunnels and disused station platforms, accompanied by an audio-visual history of the service. It’s an eerie and intriguing experience - a mixture of ghost train, theme park ride and archeological dig.