The quiet trial of the AI-powered Tube station
We've been given a glimpse at the Underground's not-so-distant future
Morning — gosh, we’ve missed a lot while on holiday. New Overground line names, the sale of an iconic part of London’s skyline, the mayor hitting back at the “poison of Islamophobia”. But there’s one story that popped up during our break that’s not got the attention it deserves: the mad results of TfL trialling AI cameras at a Tube station. For about a year, passengers in northwest London have been watched by an advanced automated system that’s trying to detect all kinds of things — fare dodging, vaping and even weapons. What to know about the trial and the tech is after your round-up below.
Plus: a major Met Police report, a beigel shop mystery and another camel on the loose.
A massive thanks to everyone who pledged a subscription to the Spy after our last email — it’s so exciting to see so many of you are up for funding us. It’s really not that long till we start sharing our new, members-only content. You too can get signed up ready for day one using the button below. You won’t pay anything yet, but you’ll automatically become a paid member when we launch. Like a crowdfunding campaign, in slow-motion. Digestible round-ups, detailed features and hard-hitting investigations — all for less than a pint each month.
What we’ve spied
⌛ London MP Paul Scully quickly said sorry after making dodgy comments about Muslim neighbourhoods last week — except by the Spy’s count his apology was actually, er, eight years too late. It turns out that Scully, MP for Sutton and a former Conservative mayoral hopeful, had already blown the dog whistle of ‘no-go areas’ in east London long before his interview with BBC London last Monday, where he gave his take on Lee Anderson’s controversial comment that “Islamists” had “got control” of Sadiq Khan. In Monday’s interview, Scully called Anderson’s remarks “really inflammatory” and called on him to apologise to Khan — but he also said he could see what Anderson was “trying to drive at”, pointing to “no-go” areas in parts of Tower Hamlets, and claiming some people “are fearful for going out”. Scully later expressed “regret” for his comments — but it’s an echo of something he said all the way back in October 2015, while giving a speech on immigration in the House of Commons: “We can look at Tower Hamlets and parts of the north, for example, where extreme groups have actually built up no-go areas for white British people”. Scully wasn’t called out back then, and in the following years, he was appointed the government’s minister for London by Boris Johnson in 2020, and then tried to become the Conservative candidate for London mayor last year. This time though, after outcry from within his own party, Scully has apparently seen the error of his ways, saying: “I'm sorry for using the word ‘no-go areas’ because it was a blunt thing that actually feeds into another set of conspiracy theories”. Better late than never?
😬 While we’re on all this: no sign Anderson is backing down over his comments about Khan, which resulted in him having the Conservative whip suspended. Polling shows 44% of Londoners think the suspension was right, 17% think it was wrong, and 39% don’t know — versus 39%, 20%, and 42% for the rest of the country. Aside from Khan condemning Anderson’s remarks as “the poison of Islamophobia”, a source with knowledge of the mayor’s security arrangements has pointed out he has faced death threats from Islamist extremists, angered by his condemnation of Jihadist attacks in the city and his support of gay rights. And in a rare moment of unity, both Khan and his Tory rival for mayor at May’s election, Susan Hall, issued a joint call for zero tolerance of antisemitism and Islamophobia in the wake of Anderson’s remarks.
🥯 Two weeks on from its sudden closure and there are still no clear answers on the fate of the yellow Brick Lane Beigel Shop. At the heart of the confusion are the two notices that appeared in the 24-hour shop’s windows on February 14 — first a writ of possession, which suggested someone was trying to wrangle control of the premises. The same day it was pasted over or replaced with another notice, purporting to be from the owners, that just claimed the shop was being shut for refurbishment. However, it’s now been confirmed the possession order was legit, and that someone is pursuing a case in the local Clerkenwell and Shoreditch county court. In the meantime the shop’s doors have been locked shut with a chain, leaving patrons saddened and its equally iconic neighbour, Beigel Bake, the only joint left standing on Brick Lane. Aside from the refurbishment notice, the shop’s owners haven’t spoken publicly about what’s going on — leaving speculation to fill the void, like in the Daily Mail, which published comments from one source who says it’s a dispute with the landlord about cash. Local businesses on the ground told the Spy they were in the dark, but some pointed out that the shop had done this before, shutting then reopening over a dispute in 2014. Something new though: on Tuesday evening, we noticed a sticker had been put on the shop’s window, saying the locks had been changed, though by who wasn’t clear. Hmm.
🚨 The independent inquiry into Sarah Everard’s killer, Met Police officer Wayne Couzens, published its first report on Thursday, and it’s as grim as expected. Among the series of warning signs about Couzens missed by the Met is evidence revealed by the report that he had allegedly committed a serious sexual assault of a child, described as barely in her teens, before his policing career began. In all his 20-year history of sexual offending, unmanaged indebtedness, predilection for extreme pornography and “vile, sexualised” sense of humour should have meant Couzens failed the Met’s vetting procedures, according to the inquiry, which was led by lawyer Lady Elish Angiolini. The family of Everard — the 33-year-old woman who was abducted and murdered by Couzens while she was walking home from Clapham Common in 2021 — issued a statement responding to the report that said: “Sarah died because he was a police officer — she would never have got into a stranger’s car”. Met commissioner Sir Mark Rowley’s reaction was to say the inquiry’s findings had exposed “long-standing fundamental flaws” in the force’s vetting procedures and provided an “urgent call to action” to reform. Someone not confident there’ll be change is one of the activists arrested at the Clapham Common vigil for Everard, who reacted by saying “there’s other Wayne Couzens in the Met right now”.
🍸 A mixed bag for London’s queer nightlife as of late, with viral success for one new venue, but a major rent battle for a veteran. Earlier this month huge crowds turned up to Broadway Market for the opening night of new lesbian bar La Camionera, with queues round the block once the venue hit capacity within an hour. La Camionera was just at the spot temporarily as a residency in a basement — but the owners have now told Dazed they’re planning a permanent venue in Hackney, above ground. But meanwhile, the owner of legendary LGBTQ+ London nightclub Heaven has raised the possibility of closure, after announcing he’s entering a legal battle with his landlords, The Arch Company, over a proposed £320,000 rent hike. Spy regulars may recognise ArchCo from our recent look at the Bermondsey Beer Mile — it’s the private company which bought most of London’s railway arches off Network Rail a couple of years back. One more controversy on the horizon: another new lesbian bar is opening in London that plans to exclude trans women. L Community will open as a private members club, so it can “legally restrict” access to cisgender women only. And one last thing while we’re on nightlife: Amy Lamé, London’s night czar, has been getting some flak recently for her trips abroad.
🔍 And finally, we leave you with:
The campaign to save a laundrette in Tower Hamlets
The campaign against ‘mega barges’ in Chelsea
Extensive polling on what Londoners think about the new Overground names
What the Overground lines would have been called, under plans abandoned in 2015
A major cycling redesign in Wandsworth
‘Heartbreaking’ news for one London property-owning parent
Freddie Mercury’s west London house being put for sale (kind of)
The latest art shortlist for Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth
TfL’s panopticon
We’ve been given a detailed look at what the Tube station of the near future may look like, after the results of TfL’s first real-world trial of AI were recently uncovered by two technology journalists.
Earlier this month Matt Burgess and James O’Malley separately acquired internal documents from the trial, which saw an AI surveillance system rolled out at a station in northwest London for close to a year. We recommend reading both of their in-depth reports — but here’s a summary of what they’ve found out and what happens next.
The trial: In short, TfL has been experimenting with artificial intelligence to spot different kinds of behaviour at Tube stations — from passengers needing help, to fare dodging, to potential aggression. Between October 2022 and September 2023, every CCTV camera at Willesden Green station in the borough of Brent was hooked up to a new AI system that featured specially trained “detection models”. There were 11 types of behaviour being watched for, detailed on the internal TfL slide below. During the trial, the algorithms would analyse the camera feeds in real-time, then, once something was spotted, ping alerts to station staff on their iPads with details and the location. More than 44,000 of these alerts were issued by the AI during the trial — roughly 130 a day.
The rationale: According to O’Malley, Willesden Green was a fitting location for the experiment — it’s a small ‘local’ station that could benefit from an extra pair of eyes. So part of the AI’s role was to help staff with safety and attending to passengers. One example was automatically spotting anybody who was standing in front of the yellow line on the platform edge. After 30 seconds the AI would alert staff, who’d then jump on the tannoy to tell them to stand back.
The AI was on the lookout for lost passengers too — someone sat on a bench for 10 minutes or dawdling in the ticket hall for 15 minutes was flagged as possibly needing help. Also, Willesden Green has no step-free access, so the AI alerted staff when a wheelchair user turned up. Other things the AI could detect were injured or unwell passengers, people on the tracks or unattended items.
O’Malley isn’t without his “nagging doubts” about the tech, but he writes: “It’s a striking example of how AI can be operationalised to increase productivity, improve safety and provide managers with more insights. And if I were TfL looking at the results, I’d think it was so utterly obvious how useful the AI cameras are – I’d want to deploy the technology widely.”
The limitations: Aside from these small safety nudges, the AI was also on the lookout for more serious behaviour — but in some cases, its performance was limited by its training data, or just thwarted by a few quirks. Like in the case of aggressive behaviour, which TfL said wasn’t something that could be detected accurately from training data. Instead, the AI used a proxy, checking if anyone was raising their hands above their head. For TfL that was “common behaviour linked to acts of aggression” — but at times that flagged mundane events, like someone reaching up to a poster on the wall.
TfL had some external help with training the AI though, like in the case of detecting if a weapon was being brought into the station. To build up that capability, TfL had a firearms officer from the British Transport Police walk around the station in front of the cameras with a handgun and a machete. How successful this was isn’t clear though — in total six weapon alerts were issued during the trial, but the documents O’Malley and Burgess acquired don’t say whether they were false positives or not.
Another finicky example was fare dodging. The AI was trained to spot people jumping over or crawling under ticket barriers, or quickly following someone else through, known as ‘tailgating’. One initial flaw though was that the AI was accidentally classifying children as fare dodgers, even though kids under five travel for free on the Tube. To get around this, the AI was tweaked to ignore anybody shorter than the ticket barriers.
The concerns: News of the trial has troubled some privacy experts. Those who spoke to Burgess raised concerns ranging from the potential for bias to a general lack of transparency over the scheme. One thing called out was that, during the trial, there were no warning signs at Willesden Green notifying passengers they were being watched by AI. TfL’s attempt to detect aggression has also drawn criticism, with some experts saying that kind of ‘emotion analysis’ can be deeply flawed. Dame Wendy Hall, a professor of computer science at the University of Southampton, told the Times: “Putting your hands in the air may be a sign of aggression to the computer, but it’s actually a pretty common human behaviour — such as someone celebrating something, or waving — so it’s about balance and what happens when you get false positives.”
TfL has stressed the technology in the trial was not a “facial recognition” tool though, unlike some of the AI tech the Met Police has been deploying in London. Instead people’s faces were blurred and data was kept for a maximum of 14 days. There was an exception though — six months into the trial TfL started unblurring the faces of suspected fare dodgers, so they could be tracked down by TfL’s revenue team.
What next: Back in December, the Evening Standard reported TfL was planning to expand the trial to other stations. But after Burgess published his article on the trial in Wired in February, Mandy McGregor, TfL's head of policy and community safety, issued a response that seemed to contradict that. She outlined TfL's current position as:
“We are currently considering the design and scope of a second phase of the trial. No other decisions have been taken about expanding the use of this technology, either to further stations or adding capability. Any wider roll out of the technology beyond a pilot would be dependent on a full consultation with local communities and other relevant stakeholders, including experts in the field.”