# London's stations keep a diary: daily taps at 434 sets of Tube, DLR, Overground and Elizabeth line gates, since 2019 TfL publishes how many taps in and taps out each of its stations recorded on every day. Wound into one ring per year, 2,826 days of counts show Wimbledon, Arsenal's home matches, Carnival closures, strike days, a state funeral and the first lockdown. Choose a station, then move round the year. ## Twelve things London's stations remember ### 5.5×: Wembley Park, Sunday 11 July 2021 The Euro 2020 final, England v Italy. The station counted 91,577 taps in the day; a normal Sunday there counts 16,768. No other day at Wembley Park rises as far above its normal day. ### 3.3×: Southfields, Monday 3 July 2023 The first day of the Wimbledon Championships: 48,850 taps, against 14,628 on a normal Monday. The fortnight lights the same slice of the ring every summer except 2020, when the Championships were cancelled. ### 3.7×: Arsenal station, 122 home matches On the days Arsenal played at home in the Premier League, the median day at Arsenal station counted 3.7 times a normal day, and 97% of those days counted at least 1.3 times. The busiest, Sunday 27 October 2024 against Liverpool, reached 6.0 times (30,945 taps). The normal day can itself include other match days, so these ratios understate the effect. ### 9.0×: White Hart Lane, Sunday 28 June 2026 The second of Bad Bunny's two nights at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium: 27,428 taps against 3,064 on a normal Sunday. On the 114 Spurs home-match days at the new stadium with a count, the median is 3.4 times a normal day. ### 401: Hyde Park Corner, Monday 19 September 2022 The day of Queen Elizabeth II's state funeral. TfL had said the station would close for most of the morning; across the whole day it counted 401 taps, against about 10,000 on an ordinary Monday (the funeral day was a bank holiday). ### 12/12: Ladbroke Grove, Carnival weekends On the 12 days of the Notting Hill Carnival between 2019 and 2026 (there was no street Carnival in 2020 or 2021), Ladbroke Grove has either no row in TfL's file (10 days) or four or five taps (2 days). For 2024 TfL announced the station closed all day on both days. ### 14%: Monday 23 March 2020: the day the lockdown was announced The announcement came that evening, a week after the Prime Minister advised against non-essential travel. TfL counted 596,000 Tube journeys that day, against 4.17 million on an average Monday in March 2019. The lowest Tube day in the file, Christmas Days apart, came on Easter Sunday, 12 April 2020: 65,000. ### 7%: Tuesday 1 March 2022: a Tube strike A 24-hour RMT strike: 180,000 Tube journeys against about 2.55 million on a normal Tuesday. A second strike two days later counted 187,000. ### 94: Christmas Day: the busiest station in 2025 TfL's Tube journey count is zero on 25 December in every year from 2019 to 2025. No station recorded more than 298 taps on any of those days; in 2025 the busiest, Heathrow Terminals 2 and 3 (Elizabeth line and Heathrow Express), counted 94. ### 65%: Tuesday 19 July 2022: red heat warning TfL had told people to travel only if essential. It counted 1.96 million Tube journeys, against 3.02 million the Tuesday before. ### 4.95 million: Friday 29 November 2019 The busiest day for Tube journeys in the whole file, and Black Friday that year. The next busiest, Thursday 5 December 2019, counted 4.91 million. ### 102% → 94%: The shrinking Friday In 2019 the median Friday carried 102% of the median Tuesday's Tube journeys; in 2025, 94%. The median Tuesday itself fell from 4.36 million to 3.64 million journeys. ## How the counts were read ### What is counted For every station and every day, TfL publishes two numbers: taps in and taps out recorded at its gates. We add them. TfL's files give no definition of the count, so it is a count of taps, not of people, and we do not know which tickets, passes or gatelines it leaves out. A dip therefore never means "nobody came": a station can be exit-only, have its gates open, or be closed. ### The days covered 2,826 days, 1 January 2019 to 26 September 2026, for 434 series, one for each set of gates TfL lists by name: Tube, DLR, London Overground and Elizabeth line stations, and some National Rail stations inside TfL's gates. A station with two sets of gates (Liverpool Street, Paddington) has two series, and some two dozen series are outside Greater London (for example Reading, Slough, Watford, Shenfield). TfL publishes the years in overlapping files; where two files carry the same day, the later file is used (66 rows differ, all by less than half a percent). Three Elizabeth line stations renamed in May 2025 and one name with a stray trailing space (Cannon Street) are joined to their earlier series, 1,039 rows labelled "Unknown" are dropped, and a station with no row on a day is drawn empty. A series that begins later (a new station, or one added to TfL's counts) starts later. ### A normal day For a station on a given day we take two medians of the same weekday: the four weeks before and the four weeks after. A normal day is that day's own count held inside the range between the two medians. A day therefore counts as unusual only when it is out of line with both sides, which keeps the first lockdown weekend, a reopening or a new station from looking like a spike. Where one side has no data (the first and last weeks of the file, a long closure), the other side's median is used if it has at least three days. Ratios are shown only where the larger median is at least 300 taps. ### Closed or no counts A day with fewer than 5% of a normal day's taps is drawn dark and called closed or silent. Often that is a closure or exit-only working that TfL announced; where our calendar has no notice we say so. ### The same time in 2019 The second view compares each day with the median of the same weekday over the seven weeks around the same date in 2019. It shows lockdown and recovery. It is empty for series that start after 2019. ### The calendar of events We gathered 1,642 dated events on 973 days from TfL notices, the Government's bank-holiday list, venue and organiser pages, Wikipedia lists and football-data.co.uk, each with its links. Strikes, closures, openings and royal events are network-wide; concerts and matches are tied to the nearest station. The page says "coincides with": a date that matches shows when something happened, not what moved the crowd. Premier League home matches are tied to a station only where the counts themselves show the effect (Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham, Fulham and West Ham stations); matches played without spectators or with very few between 17 June 2020 and 16 May 2021 are left out. Cup, European and international matches are not in that file, so a spike with no match listed is not proof there was none. ### Tube and bus journeys "All stations together" is the sum of every station's taps, and so rises when a station opens. TfL also publishes network totals of Tube journeys and bus journeys, rounded to the nearest thousand; the Tube total counts zero on Christmas Day. ### What the files cannot show Daily totals carry no hour of the day, no direction of travel and no reason. Everything labelled a cause is a date match, and the rest is blank on purpose. Figures are shown as published: a few days, such as Friday 18 January 2019 and Friday 25 January 2019, look strange in both the station counts and the network totals, and we found no notice explaining either. ### Licence Powered by TfL Open Data, used under TfL's open data licence. This page is not endorsed by or affiliated with Transport for London. ## Sources - TfL station footfall, one file per year, 2019 to 2026 https://crowding.data.tfl.gov.uk/Network%20Demand/ - TfL daily Tube and bus journeys https://crowding.data.tfl.gov.uk/Network%20Demand/ - TfL open data licence https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/terms-and-conditions/transport-data-service - Premier League fixtures and results, football-data.co.uk https://football-data.co.uk/englandm.php - UK bank holidays, gov.uk https://www.gov.uk/bank-holidays https://mariuscomper.uk/london-station-diary/