You wouldn’t expect a trip to a lost property office to stir emotions, yet visiting TfL’s facility in East London made me realise that Londoners can be much more honest and helpful than you expect
Not far from West Ham’s tube station, you’ll find a rather nondescript grey building bearing a small Transport for London (TfL) logo. It’s the only hint of the treasure trove that’s inside.
If you lose an item on the tube, a bus, or even in a black taxi, and a good Samaritan hands it in, then this is where it’ll end up. The TfL Lost Property Office handles a whopping 5,000 lost items a week, around 500 to 600 items every day, which unsurprisingly includes about 80 mobile phones.
I took a tour with Diana Quaye, performance manager at the office, who enthusiastically oversees all of the operations. While Diana’s team sees thousands of items come through the office every week, she ensures everything is handled with care and well looked after: “To that person, that’s their precious item and that’s how we treat it, all the items that come through the lost property,” she said.
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But it’s not just phones and brollies that end up here. The staff have seen an incredible range of items left on tube and bus seats, including human ashes, prosthetic limbs and even jewellery worth over £100k. The facility has a collection of the weirdest items they’ve found, for those lucky enough to visit. A WWII-era prosthetic arm is on display next to a very-80s wedding dress, a portrait of Princess Di, and a giant stuffed Gorilla.
No matter how unusual or mundane, every item that comes into the facility goes through an impressively organised sorting methon. They are tagged with the location they were found, description, and other details. Bags and suitcases are carefully handled, each item catalogued, and clues such as tags and letters with names and addresses help the team find the item’s owner.
“London has very honest people”, claims Diana as she guides me through huge racks of handbags, which she describes as “some designer, some not”. Stylish Gucci and Louis Vuitton bags sit alongside nondescript bags. Even a couple of child-sized sparkly pink handbags are waiting to be handed back to their owners. Shopping bags feature heavily among the racks too. Whether Selfridges or B&M, their contents have been carefully logged ready to be returned.
Marilyn Palmer, a property manager, has been in the office for 36 years, working hard to reunite people with their belongings. She’s full of stories about the unusual items they’ve found: “We’ve had ashes that we’ve managed to get back. One we had for seven years, before we finally reunited them with family in Germany,” she told me.
“One of the office assistants working at the time was fluent in German, so every so often we’d get them out and we’d try again. She’d written a letter to them in German, and they managed to track with the information that we’d had. We finally managed to track them down and got them back after seven years.”
Other things that turn up are much more inexplicable.
“We had a park bench in that some guys on a stag do decided they’d lift from a park in Acton and try and get it on the tube. They couldn’t get it over the barrier, so they left it. We managed to get it back to the park because it had a plaque on it that was dedicated to a husband, so we contacted the council and got it delivered back to where it should be,” Marilyn said.
A double bed and two massive 70-inch screens left in a taxi are also on the ‘most unusual’ list.
And the most valuable? That would be an old-fashioned, 1920s-style oyster-shaped presentation box. The team had it valued and discovered the necklace alone was worth £125,000.
“It turns out a mother or grandmother had lent it to a daughter on her wedding day. They’d used the taxi to go to the airport to go on their honeymoon. They then trawled back and we managed to find it. She was really grateful. She’s since passed away as well. She was just grateful to have it,” Marilyn added.
At the back of the warehouse, Diana shows me some of the bulkier items that have been left behind. Among them are bikes, chairs and lots and lots of scooter. It’s incredible to think there’s a story behind every item.
If you’ve lost an item on public transport, Diana says your first port of call should be your local station or bus operator. If 48 hours have passed, all unclaimed items are sent to the West Ham warehouse. In order to get the search underway, you can fill in an online form with a description of your item, and the team will do everything they can to reunite you with it.
There are fees for each item which helps keep the facility running. How much depends on the item you’ve lost, with fees for a mislaid laptop setting you back £26.50, while a bike or musical instrument will cost £16 to reclaim. If you don’t fancy the journey to East London, the item can be couriered to you.
But what happens to the items unclaimed within the 90-day window? Once their time is up, the items are sorted. Some go to auction, some to charity, and items like suitable sealed food head to food banks. If you shop at St. Christopher’s Hospice shops in southeast London, the item you’re buying may well have been lost property at some point. Lost money is banked and kept for a year, and illegal items such as drugs are put in a safe for the police to collect.
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So, how many items make their way back to their owners’ hands? Diana estimated that only about 12% of belongings get claimed, as many people simply don’t know about the lost property office. “I think if I left my mobile phone or something like that before I worked here, I’d be thinking ‘oh my God, insurance’, I’d go through that whole process”, she admits. “But now, if I lose anything, I’d automatically go online and fill out a form because it’s more than likely it will be here, as you can see.”
Strangely, I found visiting the lost property office uplifting. As someone who has been pickpocketed in London, it’s amazing to see so many items being handed in by honest Londoners. Around 80,000 items are in the warehouse at any time, which means an awful lot of the capital’s dwellers are kind enough to try to make a stranger’s day.
Find out more about reclaiming lost property on TfL’s website.
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