The Kiwi king of lost property
The stuff we leave behind says a lot about us, writes Gavin Haynes.
New Zealander Paul Cowan’s London Underground empire is a junction of forgetfulness, joyful reunion and gifts for disadvantaged children.
A vast filtering system he runs under Baker Street station collects the items left behind by travellers on the city’s transport system.
The biggest lost property office in Europe, it is beaten globally only by Tokyo’s depot. In the year to March, Cowan’s team of 65 sorted through 332,077 items left at train stations, bus stops and in cabs.
Very few are claimed. For example, of the nearly 13,000 keys handed in to lost property last year, just under 1400 were returned to their owners, says Cowan. Overall, 20 per cent of stock is claimed within three months; after that time, stock passes into Transport for London’s possession – and it’s not necessarily the items you’d expect.
A wander through the three basement floors that make up the lost property office gives a revealing insight into what we value enough to recover – and what we’re content to let go.
‘‘As a society, we haven’t become risk-averse so much as risk-aware,’’ Cowan explains. ‘‘Most people don’t bother to even look when they lose their keys. They assume they’ve been compromised and change the locks instead.’’
Cowan has developed an interesting insight into the human psyche, particularly into the complexity of lost shoes. ‘‘If you have one shoe, you’re more likely to go looking for the other. If you lose two shoes, well, it’s slightly ‘out of sight, out of mind’,’’ he says.
Cowan came to the lost property office after his own experience of loss, when he left a laptop on the back of a trolley at an airport. ‘‘Just turned around for a minute then had that horrible moment of realisation,’’ he says.
He was beside himself when staff called him to say they had located it. ‘‘That empathy, I guess, drew me towards the role. I used to run the 24-hour call centre for TfL, but when this position came up, I pretty much barged everyone else out of the way.’’
Cowan’s hunch is that many people approach loss as an opportunity to treat themselves to something new. ‘‘Exhibit A,’’ he says, gesturing to a 40-inch TV, stashed away next to a size 13 pair of Nike hi-tops.
There’s a lifesize gorilla, handed in a couple of years ago, which was adopted by the crew and named Eddie.
Last year, 42.4 per cent of the 34,322 lost mobile phones were reclaimed – the second-biggest share, behind ‘‘valuables’’ (44.8 per cent of 34,729) and ahead of bags (40.7 per cent of 46,318).
Umbrellas are the least likely items to be claimed. Set out in rows of handles – wooden, cane, plastic, other – just over 2 per cent of the 10,000 umbrellas that were handed in last year were returned to their owners. Cowan says they’re so cheap that no one bothers to reclaim them.
‘‘There’s a karma thing going on,’’ says Cowan, noting that even 10,000 is a minuscule number when put in the context of London’s population. ‘‘If people find an umbrella on the tube, they just re-use it.’’
Last summer, on a couple of days of monsoon-like rain, Cowan did his bit for karma when he went up to Baker Street and handed out armfuls of brollies to people coming out of the tube.
The lost items are kept in order through an impenetrable process of catalogues, serial numbers and pink laminate sheets strung from the ceiling.
‘‘The systems themselves are very old, quite complicated, but it seems to work for us,’’ says Cowan. ‘‘I tell the guys as long as they can find it in under 30 seconds, I don’t mind how they do it.’’
On the first basement level, the 30 bags of unsorted property that slid down the chute that morning have finally been tagged, bagged and logged on to the Sherlock computer system. Each item is sorted through and stripped down to its basic components in a process that can take a week. Anything still unclaimed after three months becomes the property of Transport for London, to dispose of as they see fit.
The law requires data to be destroyed. Papers are shredded. USB sticks compacted. Some items – power tools, musical instruments – are sold at auction, defraying the cost of the depot itself.
But much of it goes to charity. Clothes are immediately sent to one of the three main organisations Transport for London supports, while other bits and bobs, such as cosmetics, are cobbled together into care packages for charities. Toys go to disadvantaged children at Christmas.
Back at the customer service desk, a couple of wallets are being reunited with their owners – both with cash still inside.
One belongs to a 10-year-old boy who’d left it on a bus. He grins with sheepish delight as he inspects it with his mum – he’s got his £20 back.
The other has been claimed by a man who lost it while on his way to see The Mousetrap with his family. It still contained £120, less the £20 finder’s fee for the cabbie. He also lost something in Tokyo once, ‘‘and there, the police made me telephone the person who handed in my item, to thank them’’, he says.
In London, one of the key hazards are doughnuts – one of the favoured gifts relieved customers buy for the lost-property staff. Every item is just a statistic, but for the people who reclaim theirs, each data point is profoundly intimate – from missing medication to lost wedding rings. Guardian News & Media