Early every morning in a three-storey building in Baker Street in North London, the air is suddenly filled with the alarms of hundreds of mobile phones. The cacophony can go on for hours. The staff, however, are accustomed to it. This is Transport for London’s (TfL) Lost Property Office, which has been collecting articles left behind by the public on the city’s tubes, buses, taxis and trains since 1934. The office is the second-biggest in the world, after Tokyo. Every year, the 65 members of staff receive hundreds of thousands of lost or forgotten articles.
A Forgetful Public
Between March 2016 and March 2017, the office received 332,077 articles. Most popular were umbrellas (10,000), keys (13,000), mobile phones (34,322), ‘valuables’ (34,729) and bags (46,318). The details are put on a computer system called ‘Sherlock’. In general, about 20 per cent of the articles are returned to their owners. Only 1,400 of those 13,000 keys were claimed, and just 200 of the 10,000 umbrellas, but more than 40 per cent of the phones, valuables and bags found their way home. On days when rain surprises the city, TfL staff sometimes stand outside Baker Street station offering free umbrellas to wet members of the public.
Very Strange Objects
The objects left on public transport are not limited to just typical things such as phones and umbrellas. Some objects are very unusual indeed. One of the strangest is a life-size toy gorilla, which the staff have called ‘Eddie’, and which this year participated in an advertising campaign for London’s night-time tube service. Large objects somehow forgotten include a kitchen sink, a longcase clock and an enormous carpet. Bicycles and wheelchairs arrive in their hundreds. Sad and macabre articles include an urn of ashes (which was claimed after seven years!), a wedding dress, a hairdresser’s mannequin head, and a bag of human skulls – which was quickly claimed by its owner, a worried, absent-minded professor. The record for frivolity has to be the man who phoned to ask if someone had found his slice of cake. For happy-ending stories, there is the briefcase containing £10,000 which was returned to an old man who did not like banks.
Destroyed or Sold
After three months in the office, articles become the property of TfL. Papers and pen drives are destroyed, because of the Data Protection Act. Mobile phones and laptops are cleaned of information and then, together with other items of value such as musical instruments, they are sold at auction. The money is used to help pay for the office. Clothes are given to charities, while toys, especially teddy bears, are given to organisations preparing Christmas presents for needy children. Losing something of value is always a misfortune but, as the saying goes, every cloud has a silver lining.
