Argh: Madonna / Transport for London

So, we're trying to be good eco citizens and using public transport to attend the Madonna gig at Wembley Stadium. The Jubilee Line from Waterloo on the outbound journey is busy but does exactly what it says on the tin and gets us their without any problems. Excellent. :-)

Typical Madonna, she arrives on stage late (which makes me thing of SG blog on the topic) and the gig is amazing. Wembley Stadium is amazing. The prices for everything were "amazing" but all in all a great evening.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/09/time.html

We meet up with friends and head back towards Wembley Park station at about 11.20 and the queues are horrendous and when I say horrendous I mean "wowzers, have you ever seen so many people waiting for a tube horrendous". There must have been several thousand people queuing up Wembley Way.

The queue shuffles forward slowly and everyone is in pretty good spirits after the gig. 20 minutes pass, shuffle, shuffle. Another 20 minutes pass, shuffle, shuffle. And then suddenly we hear the announcement that everyone was dreading "Wembley Park tube station is now closed". WTF!

It's midnight and at least 1,000 people are still waiting in line to catch the tube home (remember the official website said use public transport rather than the car) and they've f-ing closed the only tube station! Argh!

The crowd went from very happy to utterly, utterly pissed off and it suddenly became a very scary place to be.

So, WTF happened? The police blamed Madonna for being late on stage and I guess they have a point (have you read Seth blog article above?) however I lay blame with Boris and Transport for London for not have a contingency in place to safely get thousands of people (many of which are not from London) home safely.

Anyway, I'll never go back to Wembley by public transport so yet more churn. I will also tell at least 10 people about our nightmare so they will probably churn too.

The most frustrating aspect of all this is I bet no one really cares and nothing will happen to improve the situation. Argh!

Prologue - we got home safely just after 2pm having walked for 20 minutes to the Wembley IBIS and waiting in their lobby for the crowds to dissipate. Thank-you IBIS I will use your hotels more in future. We finally managing to get a £40 taxi home - so much for the travel card!