Ever lost something on the tube? 300,000 things went missing last year

The list of what was left on the tube last year has come out, and some of the items people left behind are ridiculous. More than 300,000 things went missing, including thousands of clothes, 150 mobiles a day, loads of clothes including coats and weirdly enough a full drum kit. Probably the strangest item to be left was £15,000 in cash, stuffed inside a brown envelope – and apparently they get bundles of cash all the time. It turns out everything you lose on the tube ends up in a warehouse next to Baker Street. All items are stored for three months and are then donated to charities if nobody bothers to pick them up – usually Red Cross, the Salvation Army and Scope.

The staff call it the “wonder emporium” because of the variety of items left in there. Other weird items found last year are a prosthetic leg and a life sized Spiderman doll. If you’re missing either then you should probably get in touch with TfL. Their Lost Property Manager Paul Cowan told the Evening Standard:

“The number of properties lost is fascinating, every day we’re getting well over 1,200 items of property found across the network, it’s staggering. The volume continues to go up as the number of people living and travelling in London increases.Every item that comes in here has a definite story behind it. There’s the usual suspects, umbrellas, hundreds of books and documents and travel passes, but dispersed amongst that there is all the things that make you scratch your head, what were they doing carrying that or what were they doing with it.”

There’s a lot of weird stuff in here

Last year only 22 per cent of items handed to lost property made it back to their original owners. This includes the £150,000 inside an envelope, which was probably reported missing straight away. An urn of ashes which had been stored at the lost property office for seven years was also finally claimed last year.