Oxford Circus tube station was pretty heavily hit by graffiti on Christmas Day, something you will see from the video links posted below.
The graffiti seems to have been done by an established graffiti crew with the moniker DDR. Much of the graffiti seems to be anarchist/left/identity politics based in its nature but there were the occasional circled cross of a sort that I’ve seen in the past on old British Movement stickers. It was definitely a mixed bag of messages with anarchist symbols, mentions of Grenfell and how ‘covid is a lie’ along with the graffiti artists tags and the tag of the crew itself.
However when I saw the videos my first question was not ‘who did this’ but instead where were the CCTV operators at Transport for London (TFL)? Even when the network is closed or restricted, it is still a potential target for terrorists and it still needs to be monitored for intruders. Did Sadiq Khan’s TFL, cock up yet again and give the CCTV monitoring staff the day off or something? This looks to me like a major security cock up on the part of TFL.
This case raises a lot of questions such as: How did the graffiti artists manage to enter tunnels. With so much of this line underground they were limited in the number of tunnel portals between Stratford and west of Notting Hill Gate. The graffiti crew must have been in the tunnels and visible at various stations prior to Oxford Circus for an abnormally long time. Did they enter via Oxford Circus station or via an emergency exit? How on earth were they not spotted? Did someone working for TFL take a bribe to let this crew pass? Did they gain access from Mile End? All questions are on the table with this one.
What should be sobering to anyone reading this story or watching the videos is the thought that this graffiti crew could just as easily have been Jihadists who could have been planting bombs at various parts of the Central Line. Because of the terror threat and the ease with which this graffiti crew have managed to gain access to Oxford Circus it represents a major security embarrassment for TFL.
Many years ago used to live in a flat backing on to two underground lines. One time lots of graffiti started appearing. Eventually the local paper reported that the culprits had been caught and named them as the overrnight maintenance staff.
So it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that this was an inside job or someone took a bung?
It’s dark underground: PONAs are invisible?
TfL? I’m sure staff are 99% Left
All they need is camera/video recording software with motion detection (free download) and/or PIR detectors and alarm alert/pop-up
Motion detection and much else is available on COTS equipment so TFL can’t say that they didn’t have access to the correct stuff. I’m leaning to the reason that these graffitios getting in to be a lefty TFL employee, someone taking a bung or London’s less than stellar mayor trying to recover some of the money that he’s spunked on worthless guff giving all the security staff a day off.