Stay up to date with notifications from The Independent

Notifications can be managed in browser preferences.

Tubecrush: The site fuelling China's crush on male commuters snapped on London's Tube

When picked up on Sina Weibo the images garner comments such as ‘I want to take Tubes everyday!’

Loulla-Mae Eleftheriou-Smith
Thursday 05 March 2015 14:15 GMT
Comments
The men in London being snapped on the Tube and celebrated in China
The men in London being snapped on the Tube and celebrated in China

Scores of men on the London Underground are being celebrated in China for their good looks, but they likely have no idea of their newfound celebrity.

According to BBC Tending, the Chinese micro-blogging site Sina Weibo is a hotbed for pictures of man surreptitiously snapped on the Tube.

The pictures appearing on Sina Weibo, which can gain up to 100,000 likes and shares a piece, have all been pulled from a UK site called Tubecrush.net, and they garner comments such as “I want to take Tubes everyday!”.

Tubecrush co-founder Stephen Motion told the BBC that a third of the site’s entire traffic comes from China.

The site, which was set up by friends and has been running for four years, has a policy of using positive and complimentary copy to accompany the images it publishes. In terms of privacy concerns, the site’s founders claim that the pictures are fair to use as they have all been taken in public, despite often being captured without the subject’s permission.

Tubecrush also has a photo removal function where people can request to have their picture taken down. “Interestingly we don’t receive many requests. When people discover they’ve been photographed,” Motion told the BBC, claiming that people instead tend to feel “quite proud”.

The creators state that the aim of the site is to “celebrate the attractiveness of any subjects in photos that we receive and publish online,” and has addressed the reason it only posts pictures of men: “There are too many cases of street harassment towards women (more so than men) and websites such as Hollaback London to highlight this issue.

“We support what they do in stamping out street harassment and as such we delayed the launch of an updated Tubecrush.net website (which will include pictures of women too) until we have got it 100 per cent right and the messaging is clear.”

Join our commenting forum

Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies

Comments

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in