The truth about the Tube panic at Clapham Common
What TfL and the police got wrong — and why passengers were right to freak out
Morning — imagine it: you’re on the Tube and you’ve pulled into a station, when smoke and a burning smell start to fill your carriage. You’ve raised the alarm to the driver through the intercom, but it’s now been four and a half minutes of radio silence, and the doors are still firmly shut. There’s no emergency button or lever to open them from the inside. Through the windows you see people on the platform urging you to get out. What would you do?
Sorry — no doubt some of you will be reading this just as you’re about to get the Tube to work. But on Friday, May 5 last year, at around 5.40pm, this was the grim choice facing 500 passengers on a Northern Line train at Clapham Common. Photos and videos of their attempts to escape — windows smashed, doors pried open, repeated alarm triggers — garnered widespread attention, both on social media and in national papers. But at times, the public reaction wasn’t exactly sympathetic. “Classic example of mass panic. Not the first example of crowds of people acting inexplicably and won’t be the last,” was one such comment. Even police would suggest passengers had been “confused”, mistaking dust from the train's brakes for something actually burning. Later on, TfL would quietly conclude the main cause of the chaos was “human factors”, like the reaction of people on the platform trying to help.
Except, that’s not the full story. Throughout last year, we battled with TfL to get it to release a full copy of the internal investigation report it undertook in the months after the incident. And then last week, independent regulators published their own extensive examination. Together, we think it overwhelmingly shows those Londoners had good reason to panic that day. But moreover, we’ve obtained previously unseen data that reveals a worrying trend: the kind of incidents that triggered the panic are happening far more frequently. And yet, TfL has some serious blind spots in how to respond. It’s a story that matters to anyone who uses public transport in London — how prepared are we for the worst-case scenario, even if it's just a false alarm? The truth about the Tube panic at Clapham Common is below.
Months of request delays, pages of technical documents, interviews with witnesses — it’s taken a lot of digging for us to get to the bottom of this story. But we firmly believe London needs more of this kind of journalism — in-depth, stubborn, and unafraid of getting into the details. Plenty of other outlets have already written up their quick reports about the Clapham Common panic, but no one has taken the time to properly examine it all, and they’ve missed key things. And that matters for the safety of all Londoners. So we need your help funding more reporting like this for London, with a paid subscription to the Spy. Only our paid subscribers can read today’s investigation in full — but at the end of your preview, you can sign up for a 7-day free trial. Or tap the button below to upgrade right now.
Panic under the streets of London
When we spoke to Jake Sharp last year, in the days after his ordeal at Clapham Common, his chest was still bruised. “I escaped in between the carriages,” he told the Spy, four days after the fact. “I have bruises on my chest from squeezing and being pulled through.”
Jake was one of the 500 or so Londoners caught up in the events of May 5, 2023, when, at around 5.30pm, Tube passengers saw smoke and smelt burning as their train left Clapham Common. They pulled the alarm, bringing the train to a halt midway off the platform, then found themselves stuck in the carriage, unable to open the doors from the inside. The station, with its notoriously narrow platform, was particularly busy that Friday evening — earlier delays on the Northern Line meant more people than usual were on the train, while commuters were spilling out from another train that had pulled into the opposite side, just as the incident unfolded. As panic grew, and amid a perceived lack of action from the driver and station staff, some took matters into their hands. They ‘self-detrained’, in official transport speak. They smashed glass and climbed out of windows, or pried open doors and squeezed through. Eventually, station staff would open the doors from the outside, and by 6pm the last person was off the train. The London Fire Brigade would soon arrive on the scene and confirm the event had been a false alarm. And despite the chaos, no serious injuries were reported.
But in the wake of the incident, Jake found himself disagreeing with the official story being put out. Back then, we asked him what he made of TfL’s statements that its staff had “immediately” come to the platform to try to open the doors, and had “quickly” evacuated customers. He was sceptical, to say the least. “No staff came down to the platform,” he claimed to us. “They just let the hysteria happen, there was no communication at all”. He was also critical of the Tube driver: “We heard nothing from the driver whilst we were stood in the train, although people were screaming and passengers on the other train were getting off running”. Jake’s description of “smoke” filling up his carriage was also put into doubt, after a statement made by the British Transport Police in the hours after the incident: “The issue is believed to have been caused by brake dust which can often be confused with burning.”
For a while, it’s been impossible for us to verify the accounts of Jake, other witnesses and TfL about how exactly the panic unfolded. But finally, a year on, two key documents have now filled in the gaps. One is TfL’s own internal investigation, which we acquired via Freedom of Information at the end of last year, with a few redactions. The other was published publicly last week by the Rail Investigation Accident Branch (RAIB), the UK’s independent regulator that examined the incident in forensic detail. Together, they suggest the Clapham Common panic was a tinderbox situation.
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