by Craig Taylor
But I find it hard to believe because there is always an expectation that we will never live up to the promise. There’s an English thing – and maybe a London thing – about never living up to promises. I think London will continue to muddle on and some things will work and plenty of things won’t work, and somehow that combination of the working and not working is what gives it a particular energy and a particular life. If everything worked it would be like Canberra. It would be dead in the water. And if nothing worked it would be a third-world city where literally it would be like Haiti, or whatever, but this combination of not being able to get everything to work that we say will work seems somehow to give it an energy that makes it more appealing perhaps than a well-run, efficient city. I mean, if you’re always striving for success you end up with something like America, and nobody wants to be like America, really.
CRAIG CLARK
TfL Lost Property Clerk
I arrive at Transport for London’s vast Lost Property Office near Baker Street station when it is loudest, between eight and nine in the morning – when all the lost mobile phones, programmed by absent owners and sealed in their individual brown envelopes, begin to chirp and ring and speak in novelty voices and vibrate and arpeggio on the racks where they are shelved, each with its own designated number. The chorus gets louder every quarter of an hour, until a last burst of sound at nine o’clock, and then most alarms go quiet for the rest of the day.
Say a pair of false teeth gets lost on the bus one day. Someone notices it, gives it to the driver, the driver hands it in to the depot. Each depot then sends it on to us and we log it on a computer system that we use called ‘Sherlock’. Then we ask people who ring up what they’ve lost, and we input it into the computer and look for matches. It takes a bit of initiative sometimes. Things can get lost here.
Careful. That’s a sword, look. A Samurai sword. I don’t know when that came in. Half the stories we don’t know about. We get so much, it’s hard to keep tabs on everything. Pretty darn cool, though, ain’t it?
Umbrellas – we’ve got umbrellas. We’ve got Puffer fish, iron, false teeth, gorilla suits. There’s a satellite dish. You want to see the fox? There’s also a bridesmaid dress upstairs. And we reunited someone with a whip at the end of the week. She came in to collect it. It was more of like an erotic whip. If there’s something quite interesting the property team will bring it upstairs and show us. Sometimes when there’s something cute like a baby’s dress or something, everyone’s going ooooh.
You learn about trends working here. There’s a social aspect to it, you see what’s in fashion with women in the summer because there’ll be a ton of berets coming in or what’s popular reading, like the Dan Brown books when there was that big craze with him, or the latest Harry Potter. You notice if the Evening Standard are giving away a free book or something, you get tons of them in; if we have an influx of six copies of the same book on one day you realize: it just came free with the Standard.
In the summer you get lots of Ray-Bans coming in, trendy sunglasses. And you get more touristy stuff in the summer as well, guidebooks, keyrings, that sort of junk basically. And cameras. We have to ask what the pictures are, because everyone’s got a Nikon digital camera or a Sony Cybershot, or something like that. So the best thing for us to do is to go through the pictures. One chap called and said, I’ve lost my camera. I said, I think I may have found it, I’ll just go through the pictures. He didn’t sound too keen for me to do it. I asked him what pictures are on it and he said, pictures of my honeymoon. Me and my wife on the beach. I said, okay. There were. And then I sort of went one too far and there were, uh, the proper sort of honeymoon pictures.
Christmas is not a fun time. We get lots of presents come in that are wrapped up, and we have to unwrap them. We have to know what it is because Christmas paper is Christmas paper, you know? It’s all got Christmas trees on or Rudolph on or something, so we have to unwrap it to tell what it is.
Once someone rang up and said, I left a slice of gateau on the Tube today, I was wondering what are the chances of it coming in? Apparently it was a really nice slice of gateau. I had to be honest with her. I said, no, we don’t keep food, we’d just be infested with rats, this place. It takes about three or four days to get to us. Honestly, somebody had it for their lunch. You get people ring up about their packed lunch as well, they’ll leave it on the bus or something.
Another time a briefcase with £10,000 in cash came in. I think it was left on the Tube, and when we opened it up, there was a whole lot of stuff in addition to the money. We found some information that could identify the guy, including his street address, and the police got involved because it could have been a crime. That’s a lot of money in a briefcase. So they did some investigations and found the guy and rang him up and said, have you lost anything? Yes, £10,000. They said, we’ve got your £10,000 here mister, do you want to come and pick it up. He said, I can’t right now, I’ve got my Meals on Wheels getting delivered. His Meals on Wheels was more important than his £10,000. So he had to come in later. It was an elderly man and he didn’t believe in banks and he carried his cash with him everywhere.
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Any property that’s lost we make an active effort to return it. If there is, say, a passport or a driver’s licence, we’ll send a letter saying we think we may have found your property, call this number and quote this reference number and we can send it anywhere in the world. We use a courier service. You have to pay for the courier service, but it doesn’t matter where you are in the world. It can be reunited to you. We send a lot of stuff back to America, Australia, South Africa … Not a lot of people from Australia agree to it because they find it’s cheaper to buy their stuff again.
We do get angry people and we get mad people turning up. We had a guy who turned up and he was topless in the summer, okay, and he said he’d lost his T-shirt about an hour before. We also occasionally get drunks come in, or crackheads … Once these two guys came in and said they had lost a swan. I think they were hallucinating.
And we get a lot of people angry about paying the restoration fee. Generally it’s £4, but for mobile phones it’s £6, cameras £10, laptops £20. And then if it’s lost in the back of a cab they have to pay a fee which is based on the value of the property. We have to follow that, because the drivers have to hand it in to a police station first before it comes to us and that can take a minimum of an hour being in a police station. They potentially lose a fare, so it’s an incentive for the drivers to do it. And they do do it. They are really good, really good. We get lots of property back from taxi drivers. People seem to get a bit annoyed about paying for it but it costs us money to retrieve it.
If no one shows up, after three months we give most things to two charities: British Red Cross and Salvation Army. The higher-value items are auctioned off but the money goes back into the running of the operation. There’s no profit made. Things like mobile phones and laptops, we get someone to come in and wipe all the personal data off it before it’s auctioned off. The walking aids and things like crutches and wheelchairs, they go to the Third World. So there’s a nice thing about that as well.
We have lists of people’s enquiries and we search to see what’s there. One time, I found a Tiffany engagement ring, so I kept trying this woman who had asked about one for about a week. It’s a huge thing in someone’s life to lose that. That must be horrible. She wouldn’t answer her phone, she must have had about ten missed calls from me. I left her a direct number, because I was in the office and I would be always by the phone waiting patiently for it to ring. And when it did ring I was like, yes, it’s you! The relief, the joy, was brilliant. I said, if you can provide the certificate that has the serial number engraved on it, then we’ll give it back to you. And she did! I said just ask for me when you come here because I knew everything about it and it’ll save confusion. So she came in, and we went through it all. She was a little bit nervous when I was reading it; I had to tilt the ring to the light �
�� and I was nervous about it because I didn’t want her to have come in and then have to say, oh sorry, it’s not yours. But on the final digit, I was like, yeah, it’s yours. She broke down in tears when we gave it back to her.
Just yesterday a man rang up because we hadn’t unfortunately found his wedding ring after three weeks. After twenty-one days we stop searching because it’s a significant amount of time and things generally only take about four or five days to get to us. He’d gone out and bought a new one and he didn’t tell his wife. After twenty-one days we send a notification letter and he didn’t have an email so we sent a physical letter and he rang up and was like, don’t send it to my house, my wife doesn’t know. But it was too late. We’d done it … he’d got the days wrong or something. Or that was it, it had already gone to the post room to be sent. He’d rung in the afternoon and we do all the post first thing in the morning. So we were like, sorry, but … We don’t know if his wife found out. I guess if you hear a massive scream in the morning in the next couple of days, we’ll know.
People have such a bleak view of London. It’s not portrayed as a happy, smiley, honest place, is it? Especially in today’s climate, when you read every other day in the Daily Mail about muggers and just a portrayal of hell. When actually there’s a hell of a lot of good people here. It’s a testament to the honesty of Londoners and people in general who hand things in.
I spoke to someone from Mexico who was reunited with their camera and they said, this just would never happen in Mexico. It would be stolen. And even like in America, people are fascinated. This is the only place in the world basically. We’re not aware of such things happening, well, on this sort of scale.
That’s what I like about it as well, because you do know there are good people out there and we’re trying to do our best and people are helping us. The volume just keeps increasing, year on year, more stuff is handed in. I don’t know whether that’s because there’s more visitors. I’d like to think there’s more people being honest, which can only be a good thing for society really. If I had a pound for every time someone said to me, ‘Ah, my faith in human nature is restored,’ I probably wouldn’t be working here. I’d be loaded.
NOEL GAUGHAN
Driving instructor
I love roundabouts. I absolutely think they’re the best invention and I don’t care who invented the pen, the biro; whoever invented the roundabout, they should be up there on that plinth that they’ve got going on in Trafalgar Square. You can have a little bit of fun with it, you know. Will I go? Will I not go? The other car might go in my lane. There’s a bit of a dance going. It’s like a samba. Because in this city, sometimes you just come to a sudden gridlock and you think, well I’m waiting for him, he’s waiting for me, he’s waiting for him and you’ve got everyone looking at everyone – who will make the first move? And you begin to move and he begins to move and then you stop, and everyone’s being really polite. But every day you get somebody who doesn’t really care, a young lad and he doesn’t give a monkey’s. People are petrified of the Hyde Park roundabout in particular. I love it and it’s a little bit of a challenge sometimes because you get people who, not because they’re bad drivers, they just have no idea where they’re going. So they’ve come in and they’ve got their satnav or TomTom going on and it’s shouting at them to go one way and they’re thinking, no I think it’s over that way. They’re not quite sure what to do, so they’ll swing one way and they’ll have a look at the TomTom and they’ll swing back. It’s quite hilarious.
In the car you learn so much about people. Once you get started and people relax, it’s kind of like being a hairdresser. People tell you stuff. You hear these wonderful stories about people’s lives and some of them are heartbreaking. Years ago, I was very nosy. I’m not so nosy now, but still I hear yarns and sometimes you feel like you’ve had a mental workout. But you learn so much. I get a lot of business from Tottenham. People who are driving illegally and at some point they get to 40 or 50 and think, perhaps I’ll get a licence. The trouble is, you can’t pick them up from home because people assume they have a licence because they’ve been driving for years, going in and out of the house, and the neighbours see.
And then you’ve got the Australians, they’re like little English people. They never want to go home. They’ll say, I want to go back, I hate this country. And then you say, why not go back? And they say, it’s a lovely country, I don’t want to go back, I want to stay here.
Then there are the Americans who don’t quite understand the system. You go to some parts of the States, I think in California you do the test in the car park because it’s too dangerous to do it on the road and the reason it’s too dangerous to do it on the road is because everyone does tests in the car park. So they come to this country and they’re used to big, wide roads, not much traffic, everyone going in the one direction … But here they go down small roads and wonder – why’s that car in my way? And they’ll try and push you off the road. So there’s a bit of a challenge.
You get a lot from Eastern Europe. They’re quite funny, they always seem to be in a hurry. They have the Polish plates and they’re flying around, they don’t want to stop because they’re always rushing off to see some Polish movie, whatever it is, and they don’t know how to stop. And they’re always doing stuff in the car, they’re either reading a paper or they’re texting. That’s London for you now.
Sometimes I get young Bangladeshi women in full hijab. I used to think they were all downtrodden and what a sad life they lead, but they get in the car, they’re very funny, very witty, very educated, you know? They tell you about what they’re going to be doing in the next twenty years. Most of them feel very proud. I had one who was a normal sort of young girl, 18 or so. She looked much younger. Very smart. She had a very old-fashioned father, so she was only allowed out twice a fortnight: once to sign on the dole and once to do a lesson with me. Every time we were four or five minutes late returning home, he used to go mad. So literally her whole life was then through me. She was only supposed to look at Bangladeshi movies, she wasn’t allowed to watch anything else. But we had a little chat about EastEnders. I never watched it that much, but you get a grasp and play along with it. As we were driving, she’d ask me, did you watch it? And I’d go, yeah, loved it. Because you couldn’t say no! And then she’d go on about this and this and this.
Anyway, she just disappeared one day, completely disappeared. I got a phone call about six or seven months later. She’d got married to a hubby who’d come over from Bangladesh. She was pregnant, and they were going to call the child a big long name I couldn’t pronounce, but with Noel in the middle. It was absolutely fantastic. So there’s a little chap in East London, a little Bangladeshi kiddie, with a proper name and he’s got little Noel somewhere in the middle.
Once I had a pupil from Thailand, a young woman. We were in East London, in Poplar, and the pupil had pulled out. This chap just whizzed past, blocked the road in front of us, and got out of the car waving a great big knife. I thought I’d better get out of the car and stand between him and the pupil. He was shouting, ‘I’m going to kill her, I’m going to kill her!’ I said, ‘You can’t kill her because she hasn’t paid me. If you kill her, then I won’t get paid.’ And he just looked at me and thought, this man is fucking crazy, and he didn’t know what to do. I said, ‘You drive off and I won’t call the police,’ and off he went. It never dawned on me to get his number plate. I wasn’t going to call the police. He was what I would call a typical East End boy and I just think he had a bad day. He was a young lad, driving round with a little knife just in case some learner driver pulls out in front of you. And he thought I was crazy.
My pupil had only been in the country about six months and she just thought this was normal, that this is what it’s like in London. She was from Thailand, came over here as a student. I got back in the car and said, you okay? ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘let’s go.’ She thought it was part of driving in London, someone comes out and, no big
deal, threatens to kill you.
When you’ve finished a test or they’re gone for ever, that’s a very weird thing because you’re very close to somebody and you’ve got to know them really well and you’re not quite sure how to say goodbye to them. I normally say, be gone with you. That’s what I say, be gone with you now, go away. [He sweeps his hands out, a large gesture of farewell that almost upends the pepper grinder in this Turkish cafe in Dalston.] And then I usually go up to Woodford and around Epping Forest, which is proper driving. You can actually go out there and not get stuck in traffic. I’ll have a nice little drive, listening to Johnny Cash and not stopping at every set of traffic lights. It’s real driving when you get out there. So that’s what I do, I go up to Epping Forest, drive round the roundabouts. I do love roundabouts. I go out of my way to find roundabouts. If you can do roundabouts really well, you can drive.
NICK TYLER
Civil engineer
I studied at the Royal College of Music and spent seven years as a freelance musician. I play the oboe. Which was a fantastic life, but not so good for paying the electricity bills. I thought I ought to do something to earn some money and went through a period in industry before realizing that industry’s terribly boring. So I negotiated with my company to let me out and I did a Master’s course in transport. Now I sit in a university where I’m paid to think of extraordinary things, that’s what I do. Somebody who’s paid to run Transport for London has more prosaic things to think about, so they tend to come to me with specific problems. The transport system is a bit like the melody that goes through it all. Sometimes it’s going to be dissonant and sometimes it isn’t. People like me try to design dissonance out of it.