Oxford Circus station sits beneath the junction of Oxford Street and Regent Street, in the centre of London's busiest shopping district. Three deep-level lines - the Bakerloo, Central, and Victoria - converge in a tangle of tunnels and cross-passages above a single common booking hall. In late 1984, the station was being modernised, and contractors were storing rags, paint thinner, and other materials in a small store at the south end of the northbound Victoria line platform. The most likely cause of the fire, according to the subsequent inquiry, was that a smoker had discarded smoking materials through a ventilation grille above the store. The lit material fell through, ignited rags or thinner, and the fire took hold. By the time it was discovered, the materials store was beyond saving. The whole northbound Victoria line platform tunnel, and the passages leading off it, would be gutted before the night was over.

The evacuation became, almost immediately, an exercise in geography. The fire alert disrupted ten trains on the three lines. Passengers on six of them were evacuated at adjacent stations and walked back up to the surface. The other four trains stopped in their tunnels, and the passengers were escorted down the running tunnels - between rails, past the live conductor rail - to the next stations along their lines. The last passenger left the track at 12:45 a.m. By then thirty fire pumps had attended the scene. The fire was declared extinguished just before three the next morning. Fourteen people were taken to hospital for smoke inhalation: four passengers, one police officer, and nine London Underground staff. All but one were released the following day. The inspector who picked up that piece of wood had moved fast enough. No one died. The cost was measured in tunnel linings rather than lives.

The reconstruction was unusual. The Victoria line platform tunnel had been lined with a waterproof membrane containing asbestos, which the fire had compromised. To strip the tunnel without releasing fibres into the rest of the Underground, both ends of the platform had to be sealed off; the controlled removal took just over three weeks. The Central line reopened the next morning. Northbound Bakerloo line trains resumed stopping at the station on 30 November once the access tunnels had been cleared of smoke damage. The Victoria line was the slowest to come back. Service through the station resumed on 17 December - the platform tunnel stripped down to its bare segment rings, with wooden hoardings erected at the back of the platform and the whole space whitewashed. The decorative fittings would not be fully reinstated until early 1986, more than a year after the night the inspector smelled smoke.

Smoking on London Underground trains had been banned since July 1984 - four months before the fire. But at the time of the Oxford Circus incident, lighting up in stations was still permitted. In February 1985, three months after the fire, a complete ban was introduced on smoking in all underground stations. It was not enough. On 18 November 1987, almost exactly three years later, a fire broke out at King's Cross St Pancras station after what the inquiry concluded was most likely a lit match dropped onto an escalator. The flames spread upward through the wooden escalator with terrible speed, and thirty-one people died. After King's Cross, staff training was overhauled, the smoking ban was enforced with fines, and the entire culture of underground fire safety was rebuilt. Oxford Circus had been a warning. King's Cross was the disaster that should never have happened.

The story of the Oxford Circus fire is, in the end, the story of a man with a piece of wood. He had expected to deal with something smouldering on the track. He found a fire he could not approach. He retreated, raised the alarm, and started the evacuation. Five hours later the last passenger walked safely out of a tunnel. Fourteen people went to hospital and went home the next day. The asbestos was contained. The tunnel was rebuilt. The smoking ban was tightened. For three years it seemed that London Underground had been lucky enough to learn the right lessons from a near miss. Then on a Wednesday evening in November 1987, a different fire on a different escalator made clear that the lessons had not been deep enough. The Oxford Circus fire is sometimes remembered as the small precursor to King's Cross. It is also, in its own right, the night a station full of shoppers got out alive because someone smelled smoke at the right moment.