Angel tube station in Islington could be forced to close for an extended period of time due to its rapidly disintegrating escalators. That’s according to documents seen by London Centric which are a typical sign of the lack of investment in London’s transport network — and the increasingly large repair bills required to put it right.
The station has the longest escalators on the London Underground network, with three parallel structures carrying 11.7m passengers a year to and from Upper Street. One of these 200ft escalators failed in April this year and Transport for London is now privately warning that a second could fail imminently. The third is only considered to have, at best, two years of life remaining.
In a bid to buy some time and reduce wear and tear on the remaining structures, TfL is considering turning Angel into an exit-only tube station during off-peak periods from next month, meaning it would not be possible to hop on the tube from there in the evenings and at weekends.
In the best-case scenario, design work on replacing them will start this autumn and take around a year, with a complete replacement of all the equipment then necessitating either a total shutdown of the station for a further 12 months or a longer partial closure to replace each escalator one-by-one.
The documents suggest years of underinvestment in maintenance across TfL’s network is coming home to roost, with consultants and politicians predicting a steady decline in reliability. At the same time, TfL’s income from fares is also being battered by reduced demand caused by heatwaves, the growth of alternative methods of transport such as cycling and London’s population decline amid recent curbs on immigration.Escalator and lift failures are among the most visible parts of TfL’s vast £6.5bn maintenance backlog, with a quarter of tube escalators now beyond their expected shelf life.
As a sign of the seriousness of the situation at Angel, TfL commissioner Andy Lord personally briefed local politicians on the potential solutions. TfL believes passengers cannot be allowed to walk up and down the static escalators because their exceptional length creates a safety risk. Their size also makes it difficult to order and afford bespoke parts.Una O’Halloran, the Labour leader of Islington Council, has privately written to Lord to say TfL must have known about the need for maintenance and appears to have waited until it became a crisis before acting. According to a copy of the letter, seen by London Centric, she wrote: “To approach us at this late stage, with no suitable plan or seeming forethought about a replacement programme until the issue has been forced by failure, is not acceptable.”She said a total closure would be “devastating” for local businesses: “The handling of this matter has materially damaged our trust and confidence in TfL as a partner.”
TfL deny they put off informing the council. Richard Jones, director of asset performance delivery for London Underground, said it is a “challenging, expensive project” and TfL is trying to find ways to extend the working life of the escalators that have been in place for 35 years. He said: “Many years of constrained government funding for essential asset renewals has meant that we have not been able to invest in new escalators at the station. Making the station exit-only during specific periods will allow us to extend the working life of the escalators and give us more time to plan our next steps, with design work on replacing the escalators to begin this autumn. I understand that any disruption to the station will have an impact on customers, businesses and the local community and we will do all we can to work closely with local stakeholders to ensure that we mitigate the disruption as much as possible.”
Of course, there is one easy solution that hasn’t been considered. Almost two decades ago, a Norwegian man skied down one of the escalators in a matter of seconds.
This article first appeared on London Centric's October 15, 2026 edition, who provided permission for republication on LR.
