On the evening of November 18, 1987, a fire broke out beneath a wooden escalator at King’s Cross St Pancras, the busiest interchange on the London Underground. For about fifteen minutes it appeared to be one more small escalator fire of the kind staff dealt with routinely. Then, at about 7:45 p.m., it erupted into the ticket hall in a sudden flashover that killed 31 people, including London Fire Brigade Station Officer Colin Townsley, and sent about 100 people to hospital.
The inquiry concluded that the fire was most probably started by a lighted match, discarded by a passenger, which fell through a gap beside the escalator treads — gaps had opened as the escalator “crabbed” in its tracks, and 30 per cent of its fire cleats were missing — into an accumulation of grease, dust and debris on the running tracks below, which had never been properly cleaned. Fires had started in that grease bed many times before and burned themselves out. This one spread beneath the treads to the oil-impregnated plywood skirting, the varnished balustrades and the wooden steps themselves.
What turned a modest fire into a catastrophe was a phenomenon then unknown to fire science: the trench effect. With both balustrades and the floor of the 30-degree escalator trench alight, the flames could no longer rise vertically and instead lay down along the trench, pre-heating the wood ahead of them ever more intensely until a jet of flame and superheated gas discharged into the ticket hall. The effect was first predicted by computer modelling and then reproduced in scale-model tests at Buxton. Through the critical minutes, not one drop of water was applied to the fire: water-fog equipment was installed at the station, but no member of staff had been trained to use it.
The public inquiry under Desmond Fennell QC sat for 91 days and reported in November 1988 with 157 recommendations. It found that London Underground’s management had been lulled by decades of escalator fires that had never killed anyone — fires were dismissed as “smouldering,” an occupational hazard — and that no one person was in overall charge of safety. There was no evacuation plan and no system of fire training; the inspector who first investigated the fire had received no fire training at all. London Regional Transport, Fennell found, had abdicated its responsibility for safety to the operating company.
Smoking was banned throughout the Underground within days of the fire. Wooden escalator skirting, balustrades and decking were ordered replaced with metal, and the Fire Precautions (Sub-surface Railway Stations) Regulations 1989 imposed fire detection, alarms, public address systems, fire-resistant construction and regular staff fire training and drills on every sub-surface station. The last wooden escalator on the network was not retired until 2014. One victim remained unidentified for sixteen years, known only as “Body 115”; in 2004 he was confirmed to be Alexander Williamson Fallon, of Falkirk, Scotland.
Download the Fennell Inquiry Report (7.1 MB file)