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Secret tunnels are a trope of local folklore – many a town in the UK has its story about long-lost underground passages, doubtless providing the inhabitants of a monastery or castle an escape route from their confinement. Occasionally, local rumour proves to be true. A couple who bought a newly constructed house in Folkestone were told by locals that there was something buried in their garden, and during lockdown they decided to investigate. Under a concrete slab they discovered steps leading to large and well-constructed air-raid shelter. Newspaper archives revealed that the 160ft tunnel was built by volunteers during the Second World War to provide shelter for 200 women and children during the Blitz.
The Folkestone tunnel is not open to the public (though more than 2 million people have since viewed it via a TikTok video: @bexh5) but, in Stockport, the huge public shelter known locally by the euphemistic name ‘the Chestergate Hotel’ has become a must-see visitor attraction. Excavated in 1939 from the sandstone that underlies the city centre, the extensive network of tunnels and rooms could accommodate 6,500 people. Guided tours are available, or you can find your own way through the maze of kitchens, nurses’ quarters, and dormitories lined with rows of iron bunkbeds. An audiovisual introduction, static displays, and an audio-guide recall the experience of sheltering there during Second World War aerial bombing raids through the memories of air-raid wardens, children, and adults.
London’s miniature Mail Rail is another underground experience straight from a children’s adventure story. Completed in 1927, the original railway connected Mount Pleasant Sorting Office with London’s mainline railway stations, avoiding the congested streets above. In its heyday, the railway carried 4 million letters and parcels a day. A ride on the train is included in the price of admission to the nearby Postal Museum, but adults can sign up to the more extensive walking tours that explore other parts of the railway.
Also led by informative and enthusiastic guides are the various ‘Hidden London’ tours offered by the London Transport Museum, taking you into disused parts of the Tube system. Some of these are familiar as TV and film locations: the tunnels under Trafalgar Square, accessed from Charing Cross station, featured in Paddington (2014) and Killing Eve (2019), and Aldwych station, which closed as recently as 1994, was used for filming scenes in Atonement (2007) and Sherlock (2014). Original Edwardian design features are the attraction at Moorgate and Piccadilly Circus, while advertising posters from the 1960s and 1970s still cling to the walls of Euston’s dark and disused tunnels. Visitors to Down Street station, just off Piccadilly, are able to see where Winston Churchill took refuge at the height of the Blitz, in the Railway Executive Committee’s top-secret headquarters.
Vaults, grottoes, and shelters
The hidden vaults that support the Albert Memorial form one of London’s most unexpected subterranean structures. They are not open to the public, but the crypt-like complex of brick vaults can be seen on Ian Mansfield’s website ‘IanVisits’ (http://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/under-albert-48). Few of us would suspect the existence of this remarkable undercroft, but – standing beside the Albert Hall and looking across to the memorial – it becomes clear that it sits on top of a substantial mound and that to reach it from the south involves climbing a flight of stone steps. The mound is wholly artificial – the ground was originally flat – and within it are 868 remarkable arches supporting the heavyweight memorial.
Further west, at Twickenham, Alexander Pope’s grotto (built in 1720 and reached from the cellars of his now-demolished villa) was officially removed from the Historic England ‘Heritage at Risk’ register in November 2023, thanks to a Lottery grant and energetic fundraising by the Pope’s Grotto Preservation Trust. The skilful restoration of this Cave of the Naiads has already garnered a 2024 Civic Trust Award, and visitors will soon be welcome again to explore this pioneering example of Romantic garden design, fed by a natural spring.
A century later, in 1826, William Beckford constructed a similar tunnel and grotto to link his 154ft-high (47m) tower, on a hilltop overlooking Bath, to the surrounding gardens. The tower, intended to house his library and art collection, is being restored by the Bath Preservation Trust, who set out, armed only with an old black-and-white photo, to find the probable location. Beneath an unpromising patch of brambles, they found the top of a dry-stone arch that proved to be the entrance. The 3.5m-deep tunnel was used by Beckford to pass from the tower to the mile-long avenue of interlinked gardens, tree plantations, and rustic seats that led to his home in Lansdown Crescent. The Trust hopes to be able to reopen the tunnel to visitors shortly.
Another tunnel project on the horizon brings us back to London – specifically to Furnival Street, on the southern side of Holborn, where the windowless façade with a black steel door at no.39 forms the fortress-like entrance to the Chancery Lane Deep Shelter. This ‘underground town’ was dug in 1940 as an air-raid shelter, was subsequently used to store Public Records Office documents, and in the late 1940s was used to house the Kingsway Exchange, a top-secret telephone exchange designed for connecting Britain and the United States in the event of war – a rather utilitarian version of the war room in Dr Strangelove.
The exchange had a licensed bar and snooker tables for the 200 staff who worked there, and an Australian entrepreneur, Angus Murray, is hoping to turn these into one of London’s leading tourist attractions. Much is being made of the fact that this was briefly home to the Inter-Services Research Bureau – the deliberately bland name for the organisation that made weapons for secret agents and resistance fighters during the Second World War. Fictionalised by Ian Fleming as Q Branch, some of the ingenious inventions that they developed in real life featured in James Bond films, including a motorised submersible canoe to enable a frogman to carry out a sabotage mission, and a gun designed to be hidden under a long-sleeved jacket. When the shelter opens in 2027, the bar will no doubt be offering martinis, ‘shaken, not stirred’.
Listings update
CA readers will no doubt be pleased to learn that the Finnish Sauna featured in ‘Odd Socs’ earlier this year (CA 407) has been granted listed status (at Grade II), which means it is now eligible to apply for a restoration grant.
The Victorian Society’s campaign to preserve the last-remaining gas-lit street lamps in Westminster has also been successful, resulting in four more lamps being added to the National Heritage List (at Grade II). The lamp posts along Russell Street were installed around Covent Garden in 1910 to mark the start of George V’s reign. Arts and Heritage Minister Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay said that they provide ‘an evocative backdrop to many of our capital’s most cherished scenes and locations… their inimitable glow can continue to brighten the lives of Londoners and millions of tourists for generations to come’. Historic England’s statement said that further listings are likely to follow.
Two petrol pumps in the front garden of a house in Turnastone, Herefordshire, are other recent additions to the List: one dates from the 1930s and the other from the 1950s. The increase in the use of cars after the First World War was such that there were 7,000 hand-operated pumps in use by 1923, mostly located outside a village forge, stable, or hardware shop. Many of them sold British-made coal-based benzole fuel at a time when the purchase of imported Russian petrol was seen as tantamount to supporting the Bolsheviks. In Turnastone, the owners of an early 19th-century house adapted the front garden for use as a petrol station in 1919, making it the oldest surviving petrol station in England. The front room of the cottage has a counter for the sale of sweets, newspapers, and small motoring supplies, and the owners also catered for cyclists – a large, enamelled advertisement plate for Raleigh bicycles is fixed to the front façade of the house, also dating from the early 20th century.
