Qualla: King's Cross fire

King's Cross fire: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Christopher Newberry, CC BY-SA 3.0. At twenty-five to eight on a Wednesday evening in November, a passenger riding up the Piccadilly line escalator at King's Cross noticed smoke curling from beneath the wooden treads. It was 1987, and there had never been a fatal fire on the London Underground. Staff had been trained to call it a 'smouldering' and try to handle it themselves. By the time the first fire crews arrived, the fire still looked manageable. At quarter to nine - fifteen minutes after the first call - the escalator shaft erupted. A jet of flame the size of a swimming pool roared up out of the tunnel, hit the ticket-hall ceiling, and turned the rush-hour evacuation into a furnace.

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Image: Christopher Newberry | CC BY-SA 3.0

King's Cross fire: The Thirty-One

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The joy of all things, CC BY-SA 4.0. Thirty-one people died. A hundred more were taken to hospital, nineteen of them seriously burned. Station Officer Colin Townsley, in charge of the first pump fire engine on the scene, ran into the ticket hall before the flashover. His body was found beside that of a badly burned ...

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Image: The joy of all things | CC BY-SA 4.0

King's Cross fire: The Match

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Billy Hicks, CC BY-SA 3.0. The inquiry, conducted by Desmond Fennell QC over 91 days at Central Hall in Westminster, concluded that the fire had almost certainly started when someone dropped a lit match while lighting a cigarette on the escalator. Smoking had been banned on Underground trains since 1984 an...

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Image: Billy Hicks | CC BY-SA 3.0

King's Cross fire: The Trench Effect

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Billy Hicks, CC BY-SA 3.0. But the inquiry could not explain why a small grease fire became a furnace. Four expert witnesses argued over it. Eventually a computer simulation at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment showed something startling: the flames did not rise up the 30-degree escalator shaft as y...

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Image: Billy Hicks | CC BY-SA 3.0

King's Cross fire: Cyanide and Paint

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Billy Hicks, CC BY-SA 3.0. There was a second, quieter finding that the final report did not emphasise. The pathologist Patrick Toseland reported that the majority of the victims he had examined had lethal levels of cyanide in their blood. The London Underground had painted the ticket-hall ceiling with a p...

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Image: Billy Hicks | CC BY-SA 3.0

King's Cross fire: What Changed

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Subhashish Panigrahi, CC BY-SA 4.0. Senior management resigned. Keith Bright, chairman of London Regional Transport, went first. The Fire Precautions (Sub-surface Railway Stations) Regulations 1989 followed. Heat detectors, sprinklers, CCTV, alarms, and personal radios were installed across the network. The wooden ...

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Image: Subhashish Panigrahi | CC BY-SA 4.0