Interactive exhibit development for the Hidden London exhibition at London Transport Museum (opened October 2019 and hailed as the LTM’s “best exhibition yet” by the Londonist before winning the Museums & Heritage Temporary Exhibition of the Year Award 2020). Provided content development, game play, script and audio recordings for a 1940s telephone exchange exhibit designed and built by W19 Design to allow visitors the chance to test their skills as a wartime telephone exchange operator and experience some of the excitement of communications from Churchill’s secret underground office in the disused Down Street underground station. Self-resetting jigsaw exhibits, based on the original tiles from the disused underground stations that were repurposed during the war, allow visitors to have a go at reading the history of the Hidden London spaces from marks left behind by piecing the tile fragments back together.

This episode of LTM’s Hidden London Hangouts (episode 4), recorded in April 2020 during coronavirus lockdown, explores some of the history of Down Street station and this episode 18 of series 2, recorded January 2021, shows the LTM team in the Hidden London exhibition and Siddy Holloway, Engagement Manager, actually picks our telephone exchange exhibit as her favourite object – listen for the distinctive telephone ring in the background throughout the programme and imagine being one of the telephone operators under wartime pressure to connect all the calls!

Hidden London 1940s telephone exchange exhibit
1940s telephone exchange exhibit – interactive with a museum setworks feel

Hidden London exhibition montage Hidden London tile jigsaw exhibit