IN LONDON'S WILD WEST END

Evening Star, Issue 20905, 23 September 1931, Page 2

IN LONDON'S WILD WEST END

WORST TRAFFIC JAM FOR YEARS The greatest traffic jam for years occurred in London recently. Half a million people were coming from Hendon, 70,000 from the Dog Derby at the 'White City, thousands from tho test match at Lord’s, hundreds front Wimbledon. And there was the usual Saturday night theatres jam. In Leicester square, at Piccadilly, at Charing Cross, treble the usual crowds elbowed and shouldered their way in and out of restaurants and struggled for taxicabs. There were three hold-ups between Trafalgar sq»are and Fleet street. Ono was hundreds of yards long. Five and ten-minute stops were common at crossings. All the way along, by St. Clement Dane’s up to Piccadilly the people from Hendon and Wimbledon and Lord’s crawled at snail’s pace, only to get in hopeless jams in the middle of the Circus itself.

Right out to the suburbs the mammoth jam stretched. There was a twohour queue between Hendon and Colindale. It took an hour and a-half to traverse the half-mile queue to tho trains, which fan every half-minute to tho West End. Ambulance men attended the fainting women in the hot night air, while the station staff attended the passengers who wore overcome.