London Transport Museum Wins £237,000 to Save 3,314 Signs From Its Acton Depot
Somewhere inside a storage mezzanine at Acton Town, a single roundel from Tufnell Park station has been sitting in racking since it was pulled from the platform wall, one of 3,314 signs that London Transport Museum has now been given the money to properly go through. The National Lottery Heritage Fund has awarded the Museum £237,000 for a project called Acton Access: Signs, Stories and Skills, which will spend the next phase of work reviewing, conserving and reorganising the entire sign collection housed at the Museum’s Depot in Acton.
The numbers alone explain why the project exists. Station signs, bus and tram stop flags, maps, advertising panels and safety signage have been arriving at the Depot for more than 150 years, and the collection has grown faster than the space available to store it properly. Some of what’s there duplicates itself many times over, the same design of station nameplate turning up from a dozen different platforms, and sorting out what’s genuinely unique from what can be passed on elsewhere is a large part of what this grant now pays for.
What makes the collection worth that effort is what it actually traces. Among the signs is the full design lineage of the London Transport roundel, from the solid red “bullseye” that Frank Pick introduced in 1908 to the family of coloured roundels used across the network today. Pick was never satisfied with the plain disc, thinking it didn’t hold the eye, and it was the calligrapher Edward Johnston who turned it into the ring-and-bar symbol recognised worldwide. Johnston did double duty: alongside reworking the roundel, he designed the sans-serif typeface commissioned for the Underground in 1916, still in use in an updated form today and often called London’s handwriting.
This is not the Museum’s first run at the Acton sign collection. A 2023 blog post by Henry Flynn, the Museum’s senior curator for collections management, described an earlier phase of Acton Access working through 270 pallets of signalling and signage material stacked floor to ceiling, with volunteers and curatorial staff documenting it item by item. The Museum has form here, earlier this year it marked 120 years of the Piccadilly line with a season of public events celebrating the line’s history and design. This new funding extends that same slow cataloguing work, with a specific budget and a sharper focus on the signs themselves rather than the Depot’s wider holdings of vehicles, posters and ephemera.
The human side of the project sits alongside the conservation work. Local community members will be recruited to research, document and share the stories behind individual signs and the neighbourhoods they came from, since many parts of London are known locally by the name of their station as much as by the area itself. Volunteering, training and paid work experience placements will give participants hands-on experience in collections management and heritage interpretation, while duplicate signs identified during the review will, where appropriate, be transferred to other museums and public organisations rather than sitting unseen in storage.
London Transport Museum’s Depot in Acton is not generally open to the public, only appearing for scheduled open days and guided tours through the year, which means the sign mezzanine this grant will reorganise has mostly been seen by staff, volunteers and the occasional visitor on a ticketed tour. The documentation work beginning now is what eventually makes individual signs findable and citable, whether that’s a future exhibition, a loan to another institution, or simply a clearer record of a station name that stopped existing decades ago.
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