Has your judge's wig gone missing? Misplaced your prosthetic leg? If so, you might do well to check Transport for London's lost property office, which counts these among the strange and wonderful items found on the capital's trains and buses.
More than 300,000 objects were handed into the office last year, a record amount that is likely to increase as the network continues to serve more and more customers. On average, 1,200 items - including 150 mobile phones - are recovered every day. In 2014, TfL's profits from retrieval fees and auctioning unclaimed items came to £250,000, all of which the company says is reinvested into its lost property service.
Paul Cowan, who manages Transport for London's lost property building, told the Daily Telegraph that the office has seen its fair share of unusual discoveries.
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"There's the usual suspects - umbrellas, hundreds of books and documents and travel passes - but dispersed amongst that there's all the things that make you scratch your head - what were they doing carrying that or what were they doing with it?" he said.
"We've had urns of ashes come through, bundles of notes, we've got enough musical instruments - guitars and trumpets and flutes and clarinets, even drum kits - to start our own band."
Almost a quarter of the items handed are reunited with their rightful owner. As for the remaining objects, they are donated to charity, put up for auction or recycled after three months in storage.
Some items, however, are less easy to re-home
Five strangest items discovered on the London transport network:
Judge's wig
Life-sized Spiderman doll
False leg
Urn of ashes (after seven years in storage, the urn was eventually claimed by the family of the deceased)
Full-size drum kit
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