A tornado was tearing through west London.

The storm originated in an Atlantic depression that developed a couple of days earlier and slowly approached Britain via Bristol, accompanied by thunderstorms. At 4:22pm, a thunderstorm was detected approaching London. By 5:04pm, Met Office radar showed a five-mile-wide storm cell over south London.

The tornado began near the River Thames in Gunnersbury, damaging homes as it moved north towards the railway. At the Britvic works, just south of the station, it brought down a ceiling, injuring five women and a man. All six were taken to hospital.

Then it struck Gunnersbury station.

The poles supporting the platform shelter gave way, bringing its corrugated steel roof down onto the waiting passengers. Around 200 feet of station wall also collapsed, injuring someone walking past outside, while part of a staircase fell in. Others were hurt by flying debris.

It almost could have been worse as a northbound train had just left the platform.

Station workers rushed to free the 15 passengers trapped beneath the shelter, while wreckage blocked both sides of the railway track. Eight passengers were injured, six of whom were taken to hospital.

Among them was Elizabeth Bell, who pushed her son beneath her and shielded him from the falling debris. Newspaper accounts differed over her injuries as two described them as serious, while another reported minor cuts.

Mr Harry Wareham told the Daily Express that the “rush of wind sounded like two trains coming out of a tunnel”

“There was a flash of lightning. Then another flash as the cables were hit. Glass flew, and we all held our heads. It was all over in a few seconds. Then came the ambulances. We were still dazed”

The damage severed the railway’s signals and telephone connections. With debris also blocking the tracks, train services came to a halt.

The tornado, meanwhile, continued north towards South Acton, bringing down an 80-foot chimney and reaching its greatest intensity around Bollo Lane, home to many London Transport depots. It continued towards Willesden before dissipating near Southgate. In its wake were around 800 damaged homes, battered factories and warehouses, a wrecked tube station and more than 30 injured people.

Remarkably, nobody was killed.

And the passengers now stranded outside Gunnersbury station?

Passing motorists would stop and offer lifts in their cars to help them get at least some of the way home.

Today’s London news round-up:

In photos: Say goodbye to the Grove Tavern in Dulwich as the bulldozers prepare to move in Brixton Buzz

Old Salvation Army HQ in Elephant & Castle to be transformed into 720 homes and 404-bed hotel Southwark News

A man has been fined and given a community order after fireworks were stored dangerously at his shop in Southall Ealing News

Shoppers fill Oxford Street on first traffic-free day BBC News

Watford town centre ‘sinkhole’ appears under bus stop Watford Observer

Loughborough Estate residents furious as estate management board vote themselves back in at sham AGM Brixton Buzz

Since May, Waltham Forest Council offered 212 at-risk households – which includes adults living alone and families – housing beyond the borough due to a shortage of homes locally. Waltham Forest Echo

Angela Rayner has told of the “heartbreaking” sight of so many people living on the streets of London. Standard

Developer British Land has reportedly shelved the next construction phase of its flagship Canada Water regeneration in south-east London until market conditions improve. Construction Enquirer

Two men have pleaded not guilty to an alleged arson attack on a former synagogue in east London, where two explosions were reportedly heard before a fire broke out. Jewish News

…and congratulations to the Mirror for claiming to have the first images of car free Oxford Street, but rather than sending a photographer, they just took a blurry screenshot from a TfL traffic camera Mirror

And from ianVisits:

Tickets Alert: Handel’s Messiah in St Paul’s Cathedral

TfL reaches 70% of the underground covered by mobile phone signals

Royal College of Art gets approval for £90 million building upgrade

Night Maps: New exhibition explores how we have mapped the night skies

London’s Alleys: Powell’s Walk, Chiswick, W4

Last buses run down Oxford Street as pedestrianisation kicks in

Things to do in London tomorrow

Tickets released for Goldsmiths Hall tour
City of London
Tickets to attend a tour of the opulent Goldsmiths’ Hall in the City of London will be released sometime today.

How to Make Anything Signify Anything: Sir Frances Bacon and the Cryptographic Renaissance
Euston
In this illustrated lecture, will look at Bacon’s invention through the eyes of the modern world’s greatest maker and breaker of codes, William F. Friedman

Barts North Wing: Candlelit Tour
Barbican
In this special after-hours tour, experience Barts North Wing by candlelight.

Halloween Film Night: Frankenstein (1931)
Southwark
A screening of the movie inside an old medical operating theatre.

Why are doctors so miserable?
City of London
In this lecture, Professor Easton explores how anger, resentment, even hate, can arise in an increasingly pressured NHS, and how these dynamics shape frontline care.

The Secrets of Georgian Dining
City of London
Historian Peter Ross on an in-depth dive into how hungry citizens from all walks of life navigated the city’s diverse food scene.

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The rousing ‘Hallelujah’ Chorus is one of the most famous pieces of Baroque choral music. I’ve attended before, and even if the purists moan about something called “the acoustics”*, for the average Joe, the stirring song and music in the surroundings of the mighty Cathedral make for an overwhelming evening.

The performance traditionally takes place on the first Wednesday in December, which this year is 2nd December at 6:30pm.

Tickets are on sale now: Dome seating is £35, and Nave/Transept seats are £20.

Tickets are available here.

There will be a short interval.

The Messiah is part of the Cathedral’s Christmas celebrations — full details of which are here.

28th Nov at 5pm – Advent Carol Service (Free)

29th Nov at 5pm – Advent Carol Service (Free)

10th Dec at 6:30pm – A Celebration of Christmas (paid, booking needed)

12th Dec at 5pm – Britten’s Ceremony of Carols (Free)

13th Dec at 5pm – Messiaen’s La Nativité du Seigneur (Free)

19th Dec at 11am – Family Carols (Free, booking needed)

20th Dec at 3pm – Blessing of the Crib (Free)

23rd Dec at 4pm – Christmas Carol Service (Free, booking needed)

24th Dec at 4pm – Christmas Carol Service (Free, booking needed)

All four major mobile network operators (Three UK, EE, Vodafone, and Virgin Media O2 (VMO2)) are taking part in the rollout, which Boldyn Networks delivers to TfL at no cost under a concession agreement.

In addition to the existing coverage, in recent weeks, TfL and Boldyn have added the following:

Bakerloo line

Mobile coverage is available in stations and tunnels between Queen’s Park and Baker St. It is also available in stations and tunnels between Piccadilly Circus and Lambeth North, except at Waterloo.

Northern line

Continuous coverage is available in stations and tunnels from East Finchley and Hampstead stations to Waterloo station on the Charing Cross branch.

Along the southern section of the line, there is a continuous mobile signal between Borough and Morden, except at Elephant & Castle station.

Victoria line

Walthamstow Central, Blackhorse Road and Highbury & Islington stations now have mobile signal.

District and Circle lines

Mobile signal is available at Sloane Square station and in the connecting tunnel to Victoria. Mobile signal is also available at Moorgate and Aldgate East stations.

There is a mobile signal at Fulham Broadway station on the District line branch to Wimbledon.

Metropolitan and Hammersmith & City lines

Mobile signal is now also available between Moorgate and Liverpool Street.

—

Work is on track to bring coverage to the whole network by the end of the year.

As well as delivering coverage on the Tube, TfL and Boldyn are also working to introduce coverage to sections of the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) that are underground, as well as the Windrush line between Highbury & Islington and New Cross.

The project centres on the Grade II-listed Darwin Building, with architects Witherford Watson Mann working alongside Clementine Blakemore Architects to modernise its studios, workshops and teaching spaces while conserving its architectural character.

The campus is an important piece of post-war architecture in a neighbourhood better known for its Victorian cultural institutions. Designed by H T Cadbury-Brown in collaboration with Sir Hugh Casson and Robert Goodden, the complex was built between 1960 and 1963.

Its modern appearance nevertheless reflects its surroundings.

The reinforced concrete structure was clad in dark red-brown brick to complement Norman Shaw’s Albert Hall Mansions on the opposite side of the Royal Albert Hall. The eight-storey Darwin Building was conceived as a stack of flexible, factory-like spaces, with projecting staircases and split-level floors expressed in its window arrangement.

The refurbishment will adapt those working spaces for contemporary art and design education, while improving accessibility and energy efficiency.

One of the most visible changes will be reinstating the historic entrance at 1851 Place, facing the Royal Albert Hall. Changes to the surrounding public spaces are also intended to make the campus more welcoming, and while the roof terrace will not be open to the public, it will be enlarged so more students can use it.

There’s also a possibility that the original Gulbenkian building exhibition centre’s flooring and walls might survive under 1980s modifications, which could see them being restored – if they survive. A new exhibition space will also be created next to the cafe (of course).

The college says it developed the design in consultation with its community and local partners, including Westminster City Council and Historic England, balancing the conservation of the listed buildings with the need to improve their facilities.

Work began in 2025 and will continue in phases, allowing teaching and research to carry on throughout the programme. Completion is planned for 2032.

The estimated £90 million cost covers the wider campus renewal, with the RCA expecting longer-term savings from improved energy efficiency and the consolidation of its campuses.

Professor Christoph Lindner, the RCA’s president and vice-chancellor, said: “By reopening our historic 1851 Place main entrance onto South Kensington’s cultural quarter, we are not only modernising our facilities but deeply enriching our engagement with our communities and London’s creative ecosystem.”

From a Nepalese prince’s vision of the universe to attempts to replace familiar constellations with the emblems of earthly empires, and to modern NASA maps of the moon, the exhibition spans mythology and science.

Astronomical books, globes, manuscripts, and space photography show how people have assumed the heavens could explain, organise, and sometimes control life below.

The science of measuring the stars and the myths that come from telling stories about them have often gone hand in hand.

Among the objects is a Nepalese cosmogram Prince Kirti Simha commissioned in 1711. Intended for religious contemplation, it places Brahma at the centre of an eight-petalled lotus, surrounded by deities, mountains, cities, kings and animals.

The seven bright stars of Ursa Major, familiar in Britain as the Plough, appear here as the Seven Sages, aligned with rings of water and rivers. An inscription promises longevity, wealth, virtue and liberation to those who worship the world map and its stars.

I wonder if it worked?

Elsewhere, the exhibition explains that Incan observers identified a llama in the dark spaces of the Milky Way, linking its changing position to the seasons of rain and grazing. For the Maya, Venus observations helped them prepare for war, while Melanesian sailors used the stars to navigate between islands.

European astronomy supplied its own mix of calculation and imagination.

Johann Bayer’s 1603 Uranometria recorded stars with increasing precision, including their relative brightness, but still retained the figures from traditional constellations in his otherwise scientific documents.

One particularly elaborate book went further, turning its pages into working astronomical instruments. Peter Apian’s Astronomy of the Emperor, published in 1540 and dedicated to his patron, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, contains rotating paper discs and other moving parts. Hand-coloured paper, silk thread and seed pearls combine to make a book that could help its owner map the heavens.

The relationship between astronomy and patronage becomes even more explicit in a copper celestial globe made in 1699 by the German mathematics professor Erhard Weigel.

The exhibition also considers more hopeful attempts to imagine life beyond Earth. A hand-painted Mars globe by the Danish enthusiast Emmy Ingeborg Brun drew on contemporary ideas about canals on the planet, but gave them a political purpose. She imagined an inhabited Mars as a borderless cooperative society, inscribing its base with the reformist slogan “Free Land, Free Trade, Free Men”.

The arrival of spaceflight changed everything.

An original time-stamped print from NASA’s Lunar Orbiter V shows Earth photographed from the Moon in 1967. Its horizontal stripes reveal how the image was assembled from electronic signals transmitted back to Earth.

After centuries of looking skywards, people could look down.

As an exhibition, it’s more about the beauty of the old books and drawings, so look at it as a historic art collection – but with some modern science, as well.

The exhibition, Night Maps, is at the Warburg Institute until April 2027.

It’s free to visit and open Tuesday Friday from 11am to 6pm and on Saturdays from 11am to 5pm.

You can find the Warburg Institute next to the cluster of universities in Bloomsbury, a short walk from Tottenham Court Road.

It’s an old route, showing up in John Rocque’s map of 10 miles around London from 1746, as a route from the church through fields to the once rural Burlington Lane – which is today a very busy wide road leading to the Hogarth Roundabout.

There is a mystery about the name, as most online sources say that the alley was originally called Paul’s Walk, after the cathedral which owned Chiswick’s manors, and later renamed Powell’s Walk.

However, I can’t find a name for the passage until the 1860s, when it was called Church Walk, and by the 1890s it was Powell’s Walk. In fact, I’ve really struggled to find any contemporary written references to it being called Paul’s Walk.

The name change from Church Walk to Powell’s Walk is easier to trace, as it seems to have taken place when the church needed more land for the dead and took over farmland donated in 1871 by William Cavendish, 7th Duke of Devonshire.

The churchyard next to St Nicholas Church had closed in 1854 for lack of space, was partially reopened in 1867, and then massively expanded when the Duke donated a huge chunk of land next door.

So, if you start at the riverside end of the alley next to the church, it looks very much as you might expect, with metal railings separating the walking living from the sleeping dead.

However, you’re also walking along a film location, as this was used as a scene in the movie version of Quatermass and the Pit, wherechurch where the drill operator, Sladden, having been overcome by the martian energy, flees Hobbs End and races to a “local” church — St Nicholas Chiswick.

An old Yew tree is just about clinging on next to the path, but the low railings on the graveyard side are about to come to an end, with the grand gated entrance to the Dukeal extension.

Two stone slabs mark the Duke’s munifance, and the two dates of the extensions – in 1871 and 1888.

Now though, you’re walking down a long slightly winding passage surrounded by very tall brick walls. The older cemetery wall on one side and in places, often much younger walls that line the backs of gardens.

A few back doors punch the walls, but otherwise, save for the regular no-cycling signs, the passage is entirely uniformly rows upon rows of bricks and little else. It’s quite peaceful, but soon you come to the end and walk out onto the noisy polluted A316 and the Hogarth flyover.

Fortunately, you’re also only a few minutes walk from Hogarth’s House.

In the hours leading up to the closure, trucks bearing the logos of well-known maintenance and construction companies started parking along the street, and a small army of hi-vis workers slowly gathered in groups.

All hints that something was about to happen.

Bus nerds could be seen in the front of the upper decks of the last buses to ply the street, getting last-minute photos and videos before it became impossible to do again.

Then, at 8pm, the barriers came up, a block further out than the final pedestrian zone, to give the workers space to work.

It wasn’t a sudden silence, as the while vehicles were now barred from entering Oxford Street, there was still an entire Oxford Street’s worth of vehicles waiting to leave it. Some of the yellow-clad workers posed with cones and signs as the road traffic slowly thinned out and, eventually like a dripping tap running out of juice, the street slowly fell silent.

Those in the know started to wander onto the street and take in the spectacle, while most pedestrians seemed oblivious to the silence, or needed reassurance from the army of hi-vis people that they didn’t need to wait for road traffic before crossing.

Now that the road is shorn of its vehicles, the signs need to go up, or be uncovered, the barriers need to be bigger, a small forest of temporary traffic lights need to be taken down from the truck.

Two special vehicles were getting ready to start removing road markings that say things like bus stop and no parking.

Even at night, Oxford Street is a busy noisy place, but now it’s quieter, much quieter. The taxis and buses are banished. The pedicabs, with their loud music, generally obeyed the rules, but cyclists struggled to understand that Road Closed signs apply to them too.

The busy shopping street from Selfridges to just past Oxford Circus is now a human-only space – except when it isn’t, which will be mostly at night for goods deliveries or emergency vehicles.

Buses have been diverted onto side streets along the backs of the shops, so despite claims of lengthy walks that people simply can’t cope with, the new bus stops are generally the same distance from shop entrances as they always were.

However, the road still looks like a road, as work to remove the tarmac and replace it with paving slabs has yet to start and will only begin next year, once the final plans are agreed.

In the meantime, about 50 new trees and over 100 new seats will be installed along the road by next Spring, although some have already been installed.

Of course, it’s not without controversy. The council was already working on plans when the Mayor of London suddenly jumped in with his own scheme and took control of the street and surrounding area from Westminster Council.

It’s been a bit of a mystery why the Mayor thought Oxford Street was in such a dire state of collapse that he needed to step in so urgently, and do so without even talking to the council first.

Oxford Street is struggling, but that’s as much due to increased competition from the two Westfields and the Battersea shopping centre as to the rise of online shopping. Landlords disinterested in their smaller properties saw them filled up with candy stores, while two department stores closed and are being replaced with offices and smaller shops.

Whether pedestrianisation can turn that around will be the great unanswered question. There will be an immediate increase in visitors simply because of the novelty of the street being pedestrianised, which means the real impact won’t be known for a few years. In other words don’t pay too much attention to the first few announcements about how people are flocking back to Oxford Street, as that could well be a blip.

Losing two department stores as anchor tenants will have hurt the street’s appeal to the wider shopper belt, but more than that, department store closures removed a lot of free toilets people could use. One of the major improvements Oxford Street needs is turning a couple of vacant shops along the road into public loos.

In the meantime, while TfL finalises plans for the refurbishment of the street, it has been tasked with managing Oxford Street, while Westminster City Council will continue to carry out street cleaning within the pedestrianised area.

Pedestrianisation has begun, and we’ll have a better idea of what it will look like next year.

But one thing is clear – it may also get more lights, as the Oxford Street Development Corporation (OSDC), which will manage the area, has just started seeking suppliers to install advertising banners along Oxford Street, which it describes as a “significant revenue stream”.

So Oxford Street’s future may be brighter. Whether that’s thanks to more shoppers or a corridor of glowing adverts encouraging people to spend more in shops remains to be seen.

Camden Council is working on plans for full pedestrianisation, but as a short-term improvement, it is proposing several smaller changes to the area outside the museum.

The council will make several changes to traffic routes and improve some existing pedestrian crossings. It will also remove an existing dockless cycle parking zone on the corner where the longest queues tend to build up in the mornings waiting to go into the museum.

The most significant change though, will be removing several short-term parking spaces along Great Russell Street, and then paving over the space to widen the pavement.

Those are on the side of the street where the long morning queues also build up, so could make the pavement easier to use for those who aren’t planning to join the queues. There will also be new seating added along Great Russell Street.

Great Russell Street is one of Holborn Liveable Neighbourhood area major projects, and the council says that the proposed changes are easier to deliver but could have a big impact, as one of our Holborn Liveable Neighbourhood  STARter projects – improvements that they think can be delivered now, ahead of the wider project.

The plans can be seen here.

Camden Council is continuing to work on the full pedestrianisation, which it expects to put out to public comment next year.

Set in the railway arches, it harks back to the moment Frank Williams discovered co-founder Patrick Head working in a garage under a London railway arch and persuaded him to build racing cars instead.

The exhibition, W50 Live: Williams, 50 Years of F1 Racing, will be an immersive, actor-led journey through five decades of the racing team. During the show, expect real heritage cars, original artefacts, cultural details and soundscapes.

The exhibition runs from 11th to 28th February 2027 at 26 Leake Street, and tickets go on sale on 29th October 2026 here (on 26th for W Club members).

The cars that will be on display:

• FW06: the first car produced by Williams Grand Prix Engineering
• FW11B: driven to World Championship success by Nelson Piquet in 1987
• FW14B: the legendary car that dominated 1992 and secured Nigel Mansell his crown
• FW19: on display 30 years on from Jacques Villeneuve’s 1997 title win
• FW25: the 2003 car that set the record for the fastest average speed in F1 history at the hands of Juan Pablo Montoya, a record that stood for 17 years
• FW38: still holds the record for the highest speed ever reached by an F1 car, 378kph, set by Valtteri Bottas

You can also win an invitation to the launch party here.