Two London Underground lines were suspended on Saturday over fears that the Grenfell Tower block may be about to collapse.
The Hammersmith and City and Circle lines were ordered to halt their service following a warning from the London Fire Brigade.
Daily Mail reports: The London Fire Brigade said there was a ‘temporary risk’ to commuters walking into the nearby stops and waiting at platforms.
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The affected stops include Latimer Road, in the shadow of the 27-storey tower block where at least 17 died earlier this week, though the death toll is expected to rise significantly.
A TFL spokesperson said they shut service between the stops at 11.20am on the request of the London Fire Brigade.
The spokesperson, who said TFL had not received such a request in ‘recent memory’ could not say when the tubes would be functioning again. It is expected to cause extreme disruption when the two busy lines overlap.
They told MailOnline: ‘We would always act on the request on the emergency services, be it police or the fire brigade.’
Coupled with planned engineering work, the safety concerns around the fire mean the Circle Line is closed.
A sign at Ladbroke Grove station said ‘owing to the safety of the Tower’ the lines had been partly suspended.
The service information was later changed to remove detail about the safety of nearby Grenfell Tower.
The new sign read: ‘At the request of the London Fire Brigade, the Hammersmith and City line Hammersmith to Edgware Road is suspended.’
cladding similar to the type blamed for the Grenfell Tower inferno, MailOnline learned today.
At least five councils in London are to carry out safety inspections at similar developments after the White City blaze.
Now, it has emerged that £553million of taxpayers’ money has been spent on hundreds of public sector contracts to fit buildings with cladding.
Date seen by MailOnline shows more than 500 public trusts, councils, schools, universities and hospitals have spent millions on ‘cladding’ in the last three years.
The authorities to purchase the cladding, at a cost of up to £200million, include Edge Hill University, the Ministry of Defence, Bournemouth and Poole College and the Queen Victoria Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.
It is unclear whether the cladding was made from the same aluminium panels believed to have set light to the 27-storey tower block in just 15 minutes.
The data was collated by Tussell, which finds trends in UK public sector procurement.
‘This gives a sense of how common its use is in the public sector alone,’ Tussell spokesman Gus Tugendhat told the Times.
He added: ‘Over the last three years, 75 contracting authorities across the wider public sector have awarded 558 contracts mentioning cladding with an aggregate value of £553 million to 234 different suppliers.’
