How London's crime-ridden Underground became emblematic of Broken Britain

Telegraph

2 days ago

It was 4pm on a busy Victoria line train heading north. Sally Wynter was standing by the door on her way to meet a friend. Her thoughts were on the evening ahead, her eyes trained on the emails on her phone. As the doors opened at Green Park and she stepped to the side to let people off, she felt a sharp pain in her right arm and was propelled with a thud into the clear partition at the end of the adjacent row of seats.
A man had, completely out of the blue, punched her, making her lose her balance and fall smack into the perspex. She looked around, dazed and unsure who had assaulted her or if another blow was about to land. A man stepped onto the platform. To the back of his head she shouted: 'You've just hit me! Did anyone see?' The crowd waiting to board barely looked up.
Shocked, Wynter, 30, rode on to the next stop, getting off at Oxford Circus in the hope that she could flag down a member of staff. What if this man was on some sort of rampage and went for someone else? She looked up the British Transport Police (BTP) line on her phone. 'But it said it was a non-emergency line.' There were no staff to be seen, but she spotted a help point. When she pressed the button, no one answered.
She stayed there for 30 minutes, feeling 'trapped underground', pressing the green button again and again, just hoping someone would respond. 'No one ever picked up the intercom,' she says. 'I later found out that the control room was staffed but there was someone that had fallen on an escalator who was being seen to by apparently five [members of] staff, which was wild to me.'
In one of London's busiest stations, it seemed to Wynter to be a clear failure of the security system. 'You think if the emergency helpline is going to work anywhere it better be at Oxford Circus because that's probably a prime target for a terror attack.'
Meanwhile, the man who punched her in the arm had time to make his way up to the ticket hall and strike again. When she eventually found a BTP officer and told him what had happened, he called his colleague over. 'He was like: 'do you recognise that description?'' It was a match for a man who had just attacked a little boy, kicking him, then simply walking away.
A BTP spokesperson said the force have officers 'across the network around the clock, at stations and on trains, to detect and deter crime'. 'Our patrols are targeted, guided by intelligence and statistics to ensure that our officers are exactly where they are most needed.'
Wynter's case, which went viral after she called out Sir Sadiq Khan on social media, speaks to the deterioration of the transport network in the capital, where fare dodgers hurdle over barriers, crack pipes are being smoked in front of children on their way home from school, the insides of carriages are plastered with graffiti, and stories of knife attacks seem to barely make the news.
Some feel the Tube is increasingly looking like the notoriously crime-ridden New York City subway, with theft and violent crime both on the rise. Robert Jenrick was prompted to turn vigilante in May, chasing a fare dodger at Stratford station. Speaking about his experience, the shadow justice secretary claimed lawbreaking was 'out of control' on the Tube. 'It's annoying watching so many people break the law and get away with it.'
Meanwhile, fare evasion now occupies a strange corner of TikTok, where viral videos promoting it rack up millions of views. Last month, The Telegraph revealed how videos show users pushing through barriers in a practice known as 'bumping'.
The stats back up Jenrick. Since the Mayor first took office in 2016, Telegraph analysis shows crime on the Underground has skyrocketed. In the 12 months preceding his appointment there were 11,027 recorded crimes. In fact, data shows lawbreaking was actually declining between 2009 and 2016. In the 12 months after Khan's arrival, it shot up by 8 per cent. And in the year leading up to March 2024, the latest 12-month period for which data is available, 23,595 crimes were recorded – more than double the number when the mayor arrived at City Hall.
The latest figures show theft is the most common crime, making up 51 per cent of all recorded incidents last year. A quarter were violent crimes and 3.8 per cent were sexual offences. Public order violations (including being drunk and disorderly) made up more than 10 per cent of recorded incidents. The most dangerous line is the Central line – perhaps unsurprising, given it goes through crime hotspots like Oxford Circus. Transport for London (TfL) recorded 1853 offences on the line last year (a 30 per cent rise from 2023), with 360 incidents at Oxford Circus station alone.
Meanwhile, there appears to be a distinct failure to keep on top of the escalation. Last year, half of travellers in the capital said they had seen TfL staff fail to challenge fare dodgers. This despite its own figures showing one in 20 passengers evade paying at a cost of £130 million a year. Then again, when the man they flag down and ask to pay might quickly become aggressive, why would they? Last year saw a five per cent increase in reports of violence and aggression experienced by TfL staff – half those incidents related to fare-dodging.
'People are being sworn at, spat at, pushed and for over 50 per cent of cases where workplace violence is experienced by our frontline teams, fare-evading is a trigger,' Siwan Hayward, director of security, policing and enforcement for TfL, told The Independent.
A spokesperson for the Mayor of London told The Telegraph that fare evasion 'is not a victimless crime'. 'The Mayor and TfL are committed to tackling this issue and have already seen an encouraging drop in fare-evasions, from 3.8 per cent in 2023/24 to 3.4 per cent in 2024.'
If fare-dodging is the tip of the iceberg then beneath it there are seemingly endless stories about random violence and theft. It all adds to a feeling that travelling through London is a more edgy experience than it once was. Just look at the past six months.
In January, a man was jailed for 26 months for sexually assaulting two women in separate 'disgusting' acts, one at Gloucester Road, the other at Charing Cross station.
In February, there was a stabbing at Goldhawk Road and another at Archway. Meanwhile on the Night Tube at Oxford Circus, four men ripped a wedding ring from a chain around a man's neck just as the doors were closing.
In March, a 16-year-old boy was arrested when video footage posted online appeared to show teenage boys fighting with knives at Queensbury station. It was 5.30pm on a Monday. In the video, two teenagers appear to be brandishing large machetes.
In April, a pregnant woman was punched in the stomach by a phone snatcher outside East Ham Tube station. The BTP arrested a 17-year-old after tracking the phone to an address. The same month, a 23-year-old woman was sexually assaulted at Knightsbridge Tube station. She was on an escalator when a man attacked her at around 1.45am.
In May, three Jewish boys were attacked by six to seven men in a 'racially aggravated assault and robbery' at Hampstead Underground.
And last month, a 'dangerous predator' who sexually assaulted women on the Tube was jailed for over six months. Ahmad Ahmedzai targeted three women who were travelling alone on busy trains into London last year. The investigating officer at the BTP said he had 'targeted women on busy services in order to hide his sick antics'.
If the network of tunnels under London's streets are a microcosm of the rest of Britain then they paint a sad picture – one of criminality which too often goes unchecked, of casual violence, of a public which has grown immune to witnessing wrongdoing. The numbers also reflect a broader pattern in London and indeed the country. Certain offences are increasing sharply across England and Wales, including knife crime and petty theft. Six out of the ten most crime-ridden neighbourhoods in England and Wales are in London.
It doesn't help that, beyond the stats, there is a general feeling of grim deterioration. Last month, a group of volunteers took it upon themselves to scrub a Bakerloo line train which was covered floor-to-ceiling in graffiti inside the carriage. TfL has reported a surge in graffiti on trains, putting it down to a malfunctioning automatic train washer (they later said it had been fixed). The Mayor's office has previously cast the responsibility at TfL's door, calling on them to implement a 'zero tolerance strategy' when it comes to vandalism.
One volunteer, Joe Reeve, said that stepping in to remove the graffiti was a case of 'taking action when leadership don't'. 'I take the Bakerloo line every morning and I see someone push past the barrier,' he told the Evening Standard. 'Then when I get down to the Tube, every single carriage is full of graffiti. It feels like no one is doing anything to make the city better.'
The Mayor's spokesperson said TfL had deployed 'an accelerated cleaning programme in response to the specific increase in graffiti on the Central and Bakerloo lines'. 'Teams are removing graffiti 24/7, and are currently removing more than 1,000 tags per week on the Bakerloo line and more than 2,000 on the Central line.'
But while Tube passengers may well have grown immune to the mess, most would struggle to ignore someone openly taking drugs in front of them. In April, pictures of a man smoking a crack pipe on a busy train went viral when a commuter posted the incident on Reddit. 'I was travelling back from work during a busy(ish) hour when I became aware that a number of people before me had started to get up and move away before what was normal for the next stop,' they wrote.
'I looked up and saw a dirty, scuffy-looking man opposite me and I initially thought that he was homeless and that other people were moving away because he smelt bad or something before realising that he was behaving oddly and attempting to light a small, metal pipe.
'Thinking he was just drunk, I said 'Dude, no – you can't do that here' before I recognised that he was attempting to light up some crack.'
It would be one thing if it were an isolated incident, but it isn't. Though rates went down last year, there were still 470 incidents of drug-taking recorded on the network – and that's just the ones that were caught. Take another Londoner's grim review: 'I've seen men smoking crack several times on the Victoria line, once at peak rush hour. The rest of the Tube was packed; this man secured half a carriage to himself, luxuriating in clouds of sweet blue smoke. He was easily the most relaxed commuter.'
TfL told The Telegraph that with over 500 officers deployed on the network, the 'overall risk' of witnessing or experiencing a crime 'remains much lower than the national rail network'. 'We are committed to working with the police to prevent crime and reduce offending, so that every journey is safe and feels safe.'
The Mayor's spokesperson said that alongside police, TfL enforcement staff 'patrol the network every day to prevent theft and anti-social behaviour, alongside targeted operations to catch the worst offenders'.
'The Mayor encourages anyone who witnesses a crime on the transport network to report it so action can be taken, especially those crimes that are underreported such as hate crime, sexual offences, and harassment.'
Wynter, an entrepreneur who has lived in the capital all her life, is well aware that compared to some of the crimes playing out on London's transport network, a punch could seem small fry. Still, she couldn't help wondering if the second assault on a small child could have been prevented if the emergency point had worked on that afternoon in March. 'The help points don't have the text number on there,' she says. 'They don't have instructions to go towards the surface. They don't say 'if no one picks up on this you should do x'. There is no backup plan.'
Wynter worried about how the behaviour of someone so casually violent could escalate. She was also shaken. Three months on, she still feels 'more tense, more vigilant' when travelling on the Underground. 'It messes with your head,' she says.
Wynter posted about it on social media, calling on the Mayor to carry out an urgent audit of TfL's help points. She held up a poster which read: 'Sadiq Khan, I was attacked on the Tube. Help point failed. Let's fix this.' The flood of messages she received from people with similar stories to tell – stories of random attacks and broken help points – painted a dismal picture of what it's like navigating the capital.
'There was a woman who said she'd been punched in the face and knocked out by a random stranger at Old Street – and he'd done it to several other women. The city does feel very unsafe when that's what you're hearing.'
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By the time her video had over one million views, Khan's office was forced to respond. Wynter was invited to a meeting at City Hall with Seb Dance, the deputy mayor for transport. Her objective was to get them to commit to a tangible change and, mindful of the fact that 'change which is expensive just doesn't get implemented', she presumed that asking them to fix and staff all the help points might be a fool's errand. Instead, she'd had the cheap and simple idea to have stickers pasted to every emergency point with the BTP number and instructions to go to the surface to seek help. You wonder why more civil servants can't come up with such efficient solutions.
In a victory for Wynter, The Telegraph understands that the stickers are already being rolled out. Meanwhile in her own case, she attended a police ID parade earlier this month – the latest attempt to track down the man who punched her.
Underneath Wynter's post about what happened, the comments speak to the prevalence of this brand of random assault. 'I had pretty much the exact same thing happen to me in the summer of 2023,' writes one. 'Everyone refused to acknowledge what had happened and none of the help points worked.'
Another has a similar story. 'The carriage was full yet no one lifted a finger. He aimed for my temple when he tried to elbow me in the head, I was lucky he missed. London is a hellhole.' As sad an indictment of the capital as you could read.