Every Sunday between 6am and 10am, 725,139 people enter London's transport network. Most of them are going to work, or to the shops, or to see their mum. We used TfL's own data to set those journeys aside: anything that looked like the same station's weekday morning, or ended anywhere other than somebody's home, was struck off. What was left came to just over 98,000 journeys a week, and a line London has never put on the map. It runs down the Northern line from Kennington to South Wimbledon, and it stops at every Clapham.
At 6am, 1,269 people are on the move across the eleven stations of the line: the professionals, gone before the birds can judge them. Then the sun comes up and the resolve breaks down. By 09:45 the line is putting 2,847 people through the gates every fifteen minutes, more than double the 6am crowd, and still climbing when our window shuts. Nobody on this line is in a hurry.
All entries at the eleven line stations, not just the shame-shaped ones: TfL only publishes destinations in broad time bands.
Share of each station's Sunday journeys that are shame-shaped: between 6am and 10am, unlike the station's own weekday morning, and ending somewhere residential. TfL data, 2024.
| Station | Shame share | Walks a week |
|---|
Entry requirements: at least 3,000 Sunday entries, at least 1,000 of them between 6am and 10am, a residential station rather than a workplace, and at least 100 arrivals after 11pm on Saturday night. Eighty stations qualified. Caledonian Road and St John's Wood make the top ten but sit off the line; north London gets a spur when it earns one.
The big residential stations with the smallest shame share. The smug table.
| Station | Shame share | Verdict |
|---|
Beyond Wimbledon the whole of south-west London goes quiet. Richmond sleeps in, smugly. Peckham has nothing to declare.
‡ Clapham Junction is in Battersea. The people of Battersea would like that noted.
Stations you might have expected to see above, and why they aren't there. The tribunal's findings in full:
Kennington → Stockwell, with Vauxhall and Brixton on the Victoria line spur. Vauxhall sends 2,209 shame-shaped journeys home every Sunday, more than anywhere in London, which is what happens when the clubs are under the railway arches. Stockwell (7.6%) and Kennington (6.7%) are where the Northern line picks up the stragglers.
Clapham North → Clapham South. Three stations, one postcode, several thousand flatshares. The share climbs with every stop: 6.4%, then 7.4%, then Clapham South, the champion, at 9.6%. Nearly one Sunday journey in ten from this station is somebody leaving somewhere they didn't wake up planning to be.
Balham → South Wimbledon. Balham (9.4%) and Tooting Bec (9.1%) take silver and bronze, and Balham puts 864 people on the platform, the most on the Northern line stretch. By South Wimbledon (7.1%) the line has run out of Claphams and the excuses have run out with it. Morden, one stop on, is where you go to think about what you've done.
We analysed Transport for London's NUMBAT dataset for 2024, which models entries at all 471 stations on the network in fifteen-minute slices, together with its origin and destination matrices, for a typical Sunday, a typical Saturday and a typical weekday. We took the 06:00 to 10:00 window on Sunday and, for every station, compared where its Sunday-morning travellers went with where its weekday-morning travellers go. Any part of the Sunday pattern that a weekday already explains was set aside as work. Of what remained, we kept only journeys ending at residential stations (defined from the same data: places where far more people leave than arrive in the weekday rush hour) and threw out anything ending at an airport or a mainline terminus. TfL publishes destinations in broad time bands, so the destination test uses the 05:00 to 10:00 band while the counts use the exact 06:00 to 10:00 quarter-hours.
Stations qualified for the league if they had at least 3,000 Sunday entries, at least 1,000 of them between 6am and 10am, were residential rather than workplaces, and received at least 100 arrivals after 11pm on Saturday night, on the grounds that you cannot leave a party you couldn't get to. That last rule favours lines with a Night Tube, and we are comfortable with that.
None of this proves anybody's morning was anything other than innocent. What it does is remove the boring explanations, and what's left piles up exactly where London's flatshares and late licences are. Friday nights produce the same map: run the whole thing on a Saturday morning and Tooting Bec, Clapham South and Balham are still the top three. This index is a bit of fun rather than peer-reviewed science, though at 9.30 on a Sunday morning at Clapham South the data speaks for itself. Raw data: crowding.data.tfl.gov.uk (NUMBAT 2024 outputs and OD matrices).