It’s been a tough couple of years, so you’d be forgiven for becoming a bit forgetful.
Covid restrictions may have meant fewer journeys on public transport, but Londoners still left more than 110,000 items on buses, trains and tubes.
Between April 2020 and March 2021, 114,000 items including 15,615 mobile phones, 5,636 sets of keys and 6,265 pairs of glasses, were handed into Transport for London’s Lost Property Office.
All of items are either found by TfL staff or handed in by members of the public, before making their way to the LPO, which has been looking after TfL’s lost property since 1933.
They are held at the office, currently based in Kensington, for three months from the date they are handed in.
Almost 20% of items handed into the office in the last year were returned to their rightful owners.
TfL’s performance manager Paul Cowen has looked after the LPO for almost 10 years.
He said the ‘Alladin’s Cave’ of items often proves divisive, adding: ‘It has a kind of sense of awe and wonder.
‘It’s a bit of a Marmite sort of scenario, because to a lot of people, it’s just trash or “ew who would want to be dealing with that stuff?”
‘But the other lot say it’s fascinating.’
The LPO does not archive items and is not a museum, but Mr Cowen says it does reflect Londoners’ changing habits and styles.
‘Take the mobile phone,’ he said.
‘We’ve still got the original yuppie phones, a couple of the Motorola bricks from the late 90s. These things literally did weigh five kilograms.
‘And so as technologies change, we’ve seen that come through. We’ve seen the reduction of things like physical books, whereas we still have Kindles come through.
‘Clothing changes in style, the value of the items, it reflects on the fact that we are more of a consumer society and also possibly a more disposable society.
‘There is now likely to be many more versions of the same item in stock whereas previously items might have been much, much more unique,’ he said.
Among the usual suspects of items found at the LPO are umbrellas, documents, pairs of glasses and mobiles – but you’ll also discover urns full of ashes and even a double mattress.
When asked what some of the weirdest items he had seen handed into the office during his decade in the job were, Mr Cowen said: ‘If you can carry it on public transport, you can lose it and people bring almost everything and they lose almost everything.
‘It’s almost harder for me to come up with things that we haven’t seen.
‘One of the things we haven’t had is a bowling ball. That’s not an open invitation, but every time I say that I think someone will lose one just to complete my little collection. But it’s literally just everything.
‘What you define as weird is just lost property for me.
While ‘a high proportion’ of items were handed in by TfL staff, at least a quarter to a third of items handed into the office were found by members of the public.
Like many aspects of society, the LPO has not escaped the impact of the pandemic.
Mr Cowen said at the beginning of social distancing coming into force, lost property went up – something he put down to people having more space to spread out and different routines.
He said the LPO was there to serve TfL’s customers.
‘I don’t want to be giving stuff back, because I don’t want you to lose it in the first place.
‘You know, I’d quite happily do myself out of a job by not having to restore lost property, but human nature, that ain’t gonna happen, people will lose stuff, so we’ll keep doing it.
‘The general rules are, keep an eye on your possessions at all times.
‘If you have lost it, report it and you know, we’ll do our best to see what we can do to help.’
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