On Wednesday, April 4, more than 4,000 people danced through the evening rush hour at London's Victoria station in UK's biggest flash mob stunt ever.
Accoding to Evening Standard, a deafening 10-second countdown startled station staff and commuters before the concourse erupted in whoops and cheers at 6:53pm. The crowd danced wildly to their personal iPod soundtracks - in silence - for two hours.
Clubbers responded to invitation emails, urging them to "dance like you've never danced before", that went out a week in advance from the clubbing website MobileClubbing.com.
"It was my first flash mob and I'm hooked," one of the flash mobbers told Evening Standard. "I've been dancing non-stop since we began. I didn't even notice the commuters. When you get into the dancing you're oblivious to them and forget you're at a railway station."
One commuter, however, failed to see the funny side: "I was trying to get my train home but the whole concourse was filled with students dancing and I couldn't get through. The last thing I wanted after a hard day at work was to miss my train because of the idiots."
The event ended after four vanloads of police dispersed the dancing crowd. You can check out a few photos from the event here and here.
From Wikipedia: In modern usage, flash mob describes a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, do something unusual for a brief period of time, and then quickly disperse. The first flash mob was organized in New York City in May 2003, by Bill Wasik, senior editor of Harper's Magazine. The term has also been applied to distributed flash mobs, which use similar means to coordinate multiple flash mobs in separate locations.
Image by Chris Beckett
I went to one of these in 2004 - when they were first starting out. Back in 2004 - there were only about 100 of us. Needless to say we all looked like freaks in the middle of Victoria Station.