* * * * At 8 a.m. on Thursday, December
20th, a man surrounded by flames was seen ascending from a manhole in High Holborn, and a moment later a tremendous explosion tore up the street for several hundred yards. Similar explosions occurred later in Shaftesbury Avenue and Broad Street and High Street, Bloomsbury. The air was filled with gas fumes, which remained noticeable for several days. Fire-engines extinguished a fire which threatened to gut the five-storey offices of two film companies, but the flames which rose from beneath the streets were allowed to continue burning so as to use up the escaping gas. All traffic round the danger zone, and indeed over the whole of West and West Central London, was dislocated, and omnibuses took as long as half an hour to go from Piccadilly Circus to St. Giles's Circus. The danger zone itself was quickly barricaded, and crowds collected to watch the workmen in gas masks, silhouetted against columns of flame. The most remarkable fact was that only one death was caused and less than twenty people were injured, though several hundred became temporarily homeless. The damage is estimated at about £200,000.
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