Tyne and Wear Metro ticket office to be turned into mini museum

A former Tyne and Wear Metro ticket office is to be turned into a museum to remember the network's history.

The former travel shop at Monument station in Newcastle was closed in 2015 and has remained empty, despite a previous attempt to turn it into a micropub.

The unit will now be turned into a museum to tell the story of the Metro, with the pop-up exhibit featuring archive photographs dating back to the construction of the rail system in the 1970s.

Nexus's Sarah McCourt said the announcement of the museum followed a week of "commemorative runs" of the old 599 trains, which have now been taken out of regular service.

"We recognise not everyone will have been able to get on board during that week and so came up with the idea of having a dedicated exhibition," she said.

"We are adding the finishing touches to the project now and looking forward to opening to the public."

The pop-up exhibition will include pictures of the network's original trains as well as images from the present day, according to the Local Democracy Reporting Service.

The exact date it will open has yet to be announced.

"It's a fantastic project which has breathed new life into the vacant shop unit at Monument," McCourt said.

In 2019, plans to turn the ticket office into an underground micropub were approved but the project fell through during the Covid pandemic.

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