Circle Line Party

ESF CLP - Aftermath

We'd figured a spontaneous CLP organised with a mere four hours notice would gather no more than a handful of folks who had nothing else planned for their Friday night.

We were wrong.

Full length platform crowd

This shot was taken from the far end of the platform. The whole platform was solid after being nearly empty shortly before. All the gear had arrived and we were ready to go. Oddly, no Circle Line trains had appeared for over fifteen minutes since 20:40. At around 21:00 a District Line train was in the station motionless for a while, as though a fault had appeared. All Circle Line trains posted on the incoming boards were apparently terminating at Mansion House just a few stops up. No-one was sure why, although there was at least an apology...

Finally a Circle Line train appeared and it was boarded. Fully boarded. (Unfortunately a minority seemed to have a common sense failure and started making a noise before the train had even started to move. Come on folks, you know the score.) More unfortunately the train remained in the station and the tannoy announced the station had to be cleared. In hindsight and as you'll see below this was most likely caused by one of the emergency fire point buttons being triggered.

Crowd evacuating station

Over the tannoy the coded "Inspector Sands" message was on loop. This coded message is Tube "secret" message indicating a fire point has been activated and generally results in a station evacuation; more info. We've obtained the audio of this for your listening pleasure. "Inspector Sands, please go to the Operations Room immediately." (WMA format, 50K). If you would like to run some noise processing software on this and encode to mp3/ogg let us know and we'll supply the original.

On ground level outside Victoria exactly what generated the ensuing police deployment isn't clear, quite possibly a standard measure when the alarm is fired (so to speak). Certainly there wasn't any "passenger action" we're aware of. A plan to head to Sloane Sq was formed and a majority of the crowd headed that way. The live band was in full effect and this may've triggered the subsequent round-up by police vans. Meeting some of the folks involved later we heard they were there for quite a while, a few hours. If you know anything about this, or have any media (pics, vid, audio) please let us know.

We're awaiting fuller reports ...

Posted by CLP at October 16, 2004 01:53 AM | TrackBack