Cable fault causes London Underground chaos and fire

12 May 2025, 20:18 | Updated: 12 May 2025, 20:22

A cable fault has caused travel disruption and a fire in London.

The Elizabeth, Bakerloo, Jubilee and Northern lines were all disrupted on Monday afternoon after a fault on the National Grid’s transmission network.

The malfunction also caused a blaze at an electrical substation in the Cunningham Place and Aberdeen Place area in Maida Vale, a London Fire Brigade (LFB) spokesperson said.

Firefighters were called to the substation and brought the blaze under control, but three metres of high voltage cabling were destroyed, the LFB said.

It comes weeks after a fire at the same substation, which saw elderly and vulnerable residents among those moved out of their homes.

However, Monday’s fire is understood to have involved different equipment to the blaze on April 29.

Read more: Passengers plunged into chaos as London Underground network suffers power outage

Read more: Firefighters rush to put out same London substation engulfed in massive blaze just two weeks ago

A spokesman for Transport for London (TfL) told the PA news agency there was an outage in south-west London for “a matter of minutes” and “everything shut down” because of a “National Grid issue”.

He went on: “When the power goes out, the trains will have stopped, obviously, there’s emergency power on trains and stations so everything wouldn’t have gone completely black, if you were on there, but the trains would have stopped and we would have cleared some stations because there’s no electricity it might not necessarily be safe for them to be open… some people would have probably been stuck in a tunnel for a little bit of time.”

TfL officials were seen directing passengers with suitcases away from Elizabeth line services at Paddington station, recommending they use buses to get across central London instead.

The Bakerloo line entrance had been completely shut at Paddington.

TfL staff said they did not know when the entrance would reopen.

They said: “It was a power outage. The lights just went off, we don’t know anything else.

“It’s been about an hour-and-a-half now. We can’t say when it will be fixed.”

Alison Hendry, 33, and Joseph Richardson, 37, came on the Heathrow Express to Paddington after flying from Glasgow earlier on Monday.

Ms Hendry said: “It’s a bit annoying they only told us when we got here. We walked all the way across the station, we have to go all the way back.”

The pair carried suitcases from their travels and hoped to reach Walthamstow in time for a comedy show on Monday evening.

A National Grid spokesperson said: “We apologise for any inconvenience following a fault on our transmission network in central London this afternoon.

“The fault was resolved within seconds and did not interrupt supply from our network, but a consequent voltage dip may have briefly affected power supplies on the low voltage distribution network in the area.

“We once again apologise for any inconvenience and ongoing travel disruption.”

Claire Mann, TfL’s chief operating officer, said: “We apologise to customers whose journeys will have been affected. We are working to get the whole network up and running again as quickly as possible.”