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An Apollonaut travel guide
A road, a dome and a railway.
An introduction to Marylebone Road and Baker Street, where Madame Tussauds stands beside the green dome of the former London Planetarium.
On this page
Read the street
Madame Tussauds is on Marylebone Road, close to its junction with Baker Street. Its white front and the green dome beside it face the traffic of one of London’s busiest roads.
A city guide can give context without turning a neighbourhood into a backdrop. Notice how the museum’s Victorian galleries sit beside the dome built for the Planetarium in the 1950s.
A railway beneath the road
Baker Street station opened on 10 January 1863, on the Metropolitan Railway. Its Circle and Hammersmith & City platforms run beneath Marylebone Road and are the best preserved from that opening year; restoration in the 1980s brought them back close to their 1863 appearance.
Begin with a detail and ask how it was made, repaired and kept. A photograph alone cannot tell you who laid the brickwork or the conditions in which they worked.
A Marylebone chapter
The museum shows how a travelling exhibition became a fixture of the city: from rooms on Baker Street in 1835 to galleries on Marylebone Road in 1884.
Look at the meeting of the two: a Victorian building and a twentieth-century dome, now one attraction.
Make room for context
Pair this city reading with the museum’s history and the Journal. This is an introduction for visitors, not a claim that our team manages these places, commissions their restoration or represents their makers.
Read at the source
Sources & further reading
Links lead to the original publishers.
