A power cut left 127 homes without electricity yesterday after a malfunction at a power substation.

EDF customers in the CR0 CR3 and CR4 postcodes were without power for almost three hours while engineers tried to fix the outage.

Resident Mike Chapman said: "A friend of mine heard an enormous bang in the Beddington Road area and all of a sudden all the electricity went out."

A spokesman for EDF said: "A fault at an electricity distribution substation interrupted power supplies to 127 customers in the Beddington Lane area of Croydon at 5.04pm last night.

"EDF Energy Networks engineers worked on site to reconnect supplies to 35 customers at 6.01pm and all supplies were back on by 7.40pm.

"Our engineers worked as quickly as safely possible to reconnect supplies, but we realise how difficult it is being without electricity and apologise for the disruption."