Leah Rawlins is in charge of more than 120 staff at Tottenham Court Road – Transport for London’s busiest station
Leah Rawlins was only 23 when she was handed the daunting job of running six London Underground stations. Less than half a year after finishing her apprenticeship, she now makes sure the stations run smoothly while addressing any antisocial behaviour that arises during the day.
But rather than seeing her lack of experience as a disadvantage, Leah chose to use it as a key asset for the role. “I was very worried about going into a team where people are a lot older than me and where some have been in the job since before I was born,” she told MyLondon.
“I wasn’t familiar with everything, so I had to rely on my team quite a lot, but rather than telling them what to do, I was asking ‘what’s happened here?’ Or ‘what do you think we should do for the best?’
“I was a lot younger and less experienced, but I turned this into an advantage by relying on the team and using them to help guide me. Although I have the final say in what happens, we’ve ended up using ways that are a lot more effective because I’ve had lots of different people’s input into things.”
Three years on from being put in charge of the Northern line stations between Golders Green and Edgware, Leah, who’s originally from Hornchurch, took the reins of Tottenham Court Road in 2025. The opening of the Elizabeth line has made it the busiest Transport for London-run station on the entire network, with 63.4 million passengers using it every year.
She has since relished the opportunity to run a key Central London station and oversee more than 120 staff members.“It’s the same role, but it’s multiplied a lot; operations feel a lot faster-paced.
“If one line goes down all of a sudden, we could be dealing with a huge crowd of people, but it’s exciting to be working in a station that’s considered to be the TfL flagship”.
The 27-year-old said combating fare evasion and wider anti-social behaviour is a regular issue for staff at Tottenham Court Road. The fare evasion rate in London has remained unchanged at 3.5 per cent compared with the previous year, despite major campaigns by City Hall and Transport for London (TfL).
TfL has plans to bring this rate down to 1.5 per cent by 2031, but Conservatives in City Hall have accused Sir Sadiq Khan of quietly brushing past the network’s failure to reach the previous one per cent target for 2025. Leah told MyLondon she uses a range of methods to combat this issue in her own station.
“We regularly have enforcement operations in Tottenham Court Road [to tackle fare-dodging] and also work with the British Transport Police. We try to tackle these issues to make sure it’s better for our team and for those customers who are paying for their travel, so that these things are getting sorted.”
Leah joined TfL as part of its first general management apprenticeship cohort in 2017. She was initially wary about how much she would enjoy the operations side of the scheme, but this quickly changed once she got more familiar with it.
“The operational role nearly put me off applying for the scheme. I thought ‘I won’t like that’, but after doing a placement as a gateline member of staff and then a supervisor I absolutely loved it.”
Encouraging other young people to apply for TfL’s apprenticeship scheme, Leah concluded: “TfL gives a huge amount of opportunities and really supports the apprentices we have here. You get to work across the organisation, which is huge. There are a lot of jobs across the organisation you don’t even know exist.”
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