King's Cross

A match dropped through the side of a wooden escalator set light to grease and fibre in the running track. For fifteen minutes it was a small fire under the treads.

Then it went up the whole escalator shaft at once - a behaviour nobody had seen before, later called the trench effect and reproduced only afterwards in a laboratory. A wall of flame came into the ticket hall.

Thirty-one were killed. Station Officer Colin Townsley of the London Fire Brigade was found at the bottom of the escalator beside a badly burned passenger he had stopped to help.

One of the dead was not identified for sixteen years. He was Alexander Fallon, seventy-two, and his daughters were told in 2004.