Harry's Blog

We went shopping in Uxbridge at the weekend and parked on one of the higher floors of The Chimes shopping centre.

We took the lift down with the twins in their buggy. There was another couple in there with a hyperactive kid. There was also a middle aged woman with her older mother. The mother seemed scared of lifts.

Not a good day to get this lift then.

Because it fell down the lift shaft.

I've no idea what went wrong. We certainly didn't have any weightless moments, it didn't fall that fast.

What happened was that the lift descended a little while, then felt like it dropped faster before stopping suddenly. Then it dropped again, stopping again in this sudden way once more. It missed out the floor some wanted to get out on and instead arrived at the very bottom.

After what seemed like a very long pause the lift doors opened. Much to our relief. At the time we were a little shell-shocked and didn't really say anything. We even walked past people who were entering the same lift.

Coming back later after our shopping we noticed the lift was now marked out of order. We assume it didn't go anywhere after we'd left it. Looking back it's clear that what happened was some failure of the lifting system and the lift did drop, being caught a couple of times by the braking system as it was lowered to the ground floor.

Scary huh?