Tall tales: inside TfL's Lost Property Office

Among the weird and wonderful items left on London's buses, Tubes and taxis, Transport for London's Lost Property Office (LPO) has acquired enough paintings, sculptures and photographs for an entire art exhibition. The show is on for one more week at KK Outlet on Hoxton Square, and the 60 works range from drawings to painted landscapes and portraits.

But it's not just London's creative types who are prone to leaving possessions on the Tube. The LPO, which began operations in 1933, recently revealed that it shelved a record number of items in the past year - suggesting Londoners are either getting more honest, or more careless. In addition to the handing in of 41,000 books, it has received 31,000 bags, 28,000 items of clothing, 23,400 mobile phones, 10,600 keys, 8,000 umbrellas and 4,000 pieces of jewellery.

While many of us can confess to drunkenly leaving a mobile phone on a night bus, some forgotten items aren't quite so forgivable. A government official lost his job in 2008 after leaving top-secret documents containing the latest al-Qaeda intelligence on a train. And recent hand-ins to the LPO have included a royal wedding invitation and a Rolex. While one in three items are reunited with their owners, TfL stores those that aren't for three months before they're donated to charity, recycled or sold at auction. So far three people have come forward to claim their art having seen The Lost Collection, but they will not be reunited with it until the exhibition's end.

In some cases, the recovered items are so weird the owners may be too embarrassed to claim them. An unofficial top 10 list of TfL lost property includes: a jar of bull sperm, 285lb of raisins, a stuffed eagle, breast implants, a set of false teeth, an urn of ashes, a vasectomy kit, a 14ft-long boat, two human skulls in a plastic bag, and a coffin. So next time you see a suitcase unattended, don't assume there's a bomb inside