Londoners have been left horrified after a stomach-churning video appearing to show a man urinating on a London Underground seat spread widely across social media.
The clip, filmed on the Northern Line, has been shared multiple times online and has racked up thousands of views.
Commuters have taken to TikTok to share their disgust, with some laying down newspaper before daring to take a seat and others refusing to sit down altogether.
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Those patterned fabric seats are designed to look pretty, but they were also picked because of how good they are at hiding “signs of dirt, wear and tear” and whatever else may be lurking under there…
For passengers already on edge after recent reports of cockroaches infesting London’s buses, the video has re-ignited fears about what we might all be sitting on everyday.
So just how clean is the tube?
According to Freedom of Information Request responses, seats across the underground are brushed and checked daily before and after service. A deeper clean, where seats are hoovered but not always shampooed, takes place every 28 days.
The Northern Line, known for higher levels of dust and dirt, also gets an annual steam clean.
Under that schedule trains should be getting a proper scrub around once a month, but figures released through a Freedom of Information Request last year show that this wasn’t always the case.
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Throughout 2024, Northern Line trains had a recorded deep clean on average seven times in the year, a little more than once every two months.
For some unlucky carriages, it was as few as four times a year, recording a deep clean once every three months.
In a huge win for Central Line commuters, those carriages recorded a deep clean around once a month in 2024, much closer to schedule.
Carriages are sometimes taken out of service for a deep clean when they are classed as “soiled”, which is a nice way of saying someone’s spilled, splattered, or worse.
Hundreds of trains have been reportedly soiled over the past few years according to TFL data, so accidents clearly do happen.
The Northern Line, being one of the busiest lines on the network, racked up the most cleanliness complaints between 2023/24, and unsurprisingly accounted for the most soil-ings.
As the video continues to spread disgust online, avoiding “that seat” is becoming a game of Russian roulette, and most are betting on staying standing.
It’s not just commuters clutching disinfectant wipes. Last year, it was the bus drivers who sounded the alarm on cockroaches crawling through the fleet.
Earlier this year, RMT Union members took their fight to City Hall, protesting outside a TfL board meeting and demanding that cleaners be brought back in-house. Currently, cleaning on the Tube and buses is privately contracted, which the union says can lead to uneven standards.
With millions of passengers passing through the London Underground everyday, it’s certain every seat has a story to tell, but maybe some are better left untold.
TfL declined to comment.
