Fast and furious on Exhibition Road

The signs are there, if you know where to look. Maybe you’ll catch a glimpse of the tyre marks outside the Science Museum. Or the new surveillance cameras at the roundabout that borders Imperial College. Or a discarded flier trapped below the cascading feet of hurried tourists. Innocuous when taken individually, collectively they hint to what has been happening when night falls on one of London’s most famous streets.

It all started last summer. I was attending a conference on pedestrianisation while researching another story for The Londoner, when one of the speakers, Freya Stannard, made a surprising admission. Stannard is the director of the Exhibition Road Cultural Group, a collection of museums that sit along the road of the same name in South Kensington, such as the Natural History Museum, Science Museum and V&A. The road’s experiment with pedestrianisation, which had seen the iconic street turned into a “shared space” with no separation between pedestrians and drivers, had led to some… unexpected results, Stannard divulged. Put simply, it had suddenly become the capital’s go to spot for drag racing. Much to the confusion of the museums, the car meets had been growing in popularity and intensity for years, with some of the hundreds of drivers who turn up coming from as far away as Plymouth.

For the next few months, I tried to find out more about these mysterious late-night car meets on one of the capital’s most famous streets, reaching out to residents, councils and the police. That was when the anonymous emails started.

How car meets took over Exhibition Road

They first spotted the racers in Waterloo, gathering by the London Eye. The undercover officers kept their distance from the group, slowly trailing as they made their way across the river, through Belgravia and over to Exhibition Road. It was almost midnight. Around the corner dozens of officers were already laying in wait, a trap that had been planned ever since the racers last came to Kensington, three weeks prior. For the next hour, they watched, slowly gathering evidence. Then, at 12.40am they swooped in, blocking the exits from either side of Exhibition Road and trapping the racers in. There were arrests, and dozens of the drivers were marked with Section 59 notices — meaning if they were caught at similar events in future their cars would be confiscated. One car, a jet-black BMW, was taken.

The crackdown happened back in January 2022, one of several major operations launched by the Met designed to stamp out the growing issue of drag racing on Exhibition Road, though we only found out about it after a police report on the event was sent to The Londoner by an anonymous tipster. It came after months of trying to get access to the police or council’s efforts to deal with the car meets. Finally, in a fit of desperation, we emailed the heads of almost two dozen local residents’ associations about the issue.

Soon after, Mel* reached out. In an email from a burner account topped with “PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL”, she explained that while she wanted to speak out about the car meets that have been blighting their area, she was scared of potential repercussions from the drivers themselves, who she claimed were criminals. Even after agreeing to meet and tell us her story in a nearby coffee shop, she was still adamant that she didn’t want her name to be public.