London is big. Really, really big. This comes as no surprise to anyone who has ever arrived here from out of town, but those of us who call this mad place home will occasionally be hit by the sudden realisation that this city is much, much bigger than we even thought.

I mention this because we're used to thinking about our city on a smaller, more familiar and manageable scale. We know how the bits of the city we're intimate with fit together. We don't need maps or timetables to navigate to work, or home, or favourite pubs and friends' houses. For many of us, London isn't this giant, sprawling, impossibly huge metropolis, but a very specific, local experience, or a string of them. My London is the area where I grew up and went to school, the places where I've explored by bus, train, tube and river, the areas where I've lived, and loved, and worked, and played over the years. The city itself may be too big to imagine, comprehensively know or handle, but *my* London is familiar and detailed, as comfortable as an old shoe. And it's those details which make it feel like a place I know and love. It's a known quantity, for and with all its faults and benefits.

But the scale of the place was brought home to me again when I visited the newly re-opened London Transport Museum, and looked closely at the huge collection of maps, and fare charts and destination boards they have in their collection. It was revealing to look at these objects not as familiar articles of daily navigation, but as ways of describing the limits and localities and lives of the city. Places I'd never heard of, just down the road. New ways of thinking about the place I call home. New ways of imagining the lives and realities of all the people who live and have lived in this strange, complicated place, and how they have gone about their daily business, and how the city's infrastructure has flexed and developed in response to their needs.

Sometimes it takes a new interpretation to help you to see something familiar in a new way.

I like details. I like thinking about the big through the perspective of the small. Which is why, at the LT Museum Flickr minimeet, I decided to focus on the details of moving around this great city, both in time and in geography. Most of my photos from the day (the full set can be found here on Flickr) are of tiny details of the artefacts and displays in the museum, because they reveal a great deal about the life of the network.

I became fascinated with the fonts and designs used over time within the LT system. But it's not always been heroic Harry Beck and his fabulous fonts. In fact, one of my favourite finds in the collection was this train carriage door handle unit, engraved with the words "Live in MetroLand" in flourished script.

I thought this was a really interesting example of two things - first, that at one point, the endless suburbs of Northwest London were marketed as a haven of peace and tranquility and commuter heaven. It's an interesting way to think about an area which is so familiar - can we imagine Harrow and Ruislip these days as being so glamorous as to have a name like "MetroLand" which gives an air of a place both futuristic and hopelessly quaint at the same time? And secondly, I loved the idea that back then, people would go to the trouble of creating beautifully detailed and designed objects, rather than just functional mass-produced items. Can you imagine a door handle on today's transport system being engraved with such an aspirational message? And in such a flowing hand? Actually, come to think of it, when was the last time you saw a door handle on a train at all?

The other photo I'm particularly fond of from the day at the LT museum is another example of looking at things differently. This image was taken in a section staged to look like a mid-century living room. I love this picture because of the way the 1930s mirror frames the beautiful ironwork of the museum structure.

There's so much to see and do within the museum, that it's easy to miss one of the most amazing things about the museum altogether - the building it's housed in is an impressive Victorian iron and glass building that originally formed part of the Covent Garden flower market. The high curves and generous light of the building enhance the experience of visiting the museum, and make it possible for the displays to be laid out in multiple levels and walkways across a wide, airy space.

My two lingering impressions of the museum are
a) that it's rare to visit a museum which has such an interesting and engaging layout - the way that the museum is navigated is unexpected and rewarding and
b) that the attention to detail is astounding. There are levels and levels of information and assets - ranging from the big (an original trolleybus) to the small (branded buttons from a conductor's jacket, or a wartime ticket stub), and information about everything from the cost of tea and a bun during wartime nights spent sheltering in the underground stations to the design differences in moquette on various lines.

I've got to be honest: me and London Transport....we've had a complicated relationship over the years. For me, the London Transport network manages to simultaneously be both sprawlingly vast and local and relevant. The experience of using it every day is a combination of frustration - not so much the infrastructure as the social environment (commuters with poor hygiene in the summer months and open-mouthed coughing in the winter ones, I'm looking at you) - and wonder because in a city so huge, and with so many people to cart around, the fact that it works at all is a miracle. We take it for granted a lot of the time, and we really shouldn't.

That the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden manages to present and interpret both the scale of the network's reach, history and ambition alongside the tiniest details of its operation and the people who rely on it everyday is truly impressive.

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