The Times: The secret city is a great reservoir of urban myth.
Great article about the urban legend fodder that is ‘the city beneath the
city’.
Date: Mon, 09 Jun 2003 15:19:37 +0100
From: “Martin Adamson” (spam-protected)
To: (spam-protected)
Subject: The secret city is a great reservoir of urban myth
The Times
June 09, 2003
The secret city is a great reservoir of urban myth
Richard Morrison
YOU know what worries me most about London? It’s how the buildings stand up.
It seems miraculous that they aren’t wobbling like a contralto’s bosom. So
many tunnels, bunkers, sewers, stations and vaults have been dug beneath the
capital that the famous clay on which London is built must now resemble a
Swiss cheese. Last week the Post Office closed its Mail Rail, the underground
train that sped our epistles from Whitechapel to Paddington, or vice versa,
for 75 years. Most Londoners were vaguely aware of its existence. But what
else is down there? The answer is that nobody knows the whole truth, and most
of us don’t know a hundredth of it. But that’s fine with me, because in the
absence of hard facts this secret city-beneath-the-city is a wonderful
reservoir of urban myth. And that’s much more entertaining.
Some things I do know. The Bank of England also has its own underground
railway, presumably to cart sackfuls of dosh to fat cats in the Square Mile.
So does Harrods, presumably to cart the sackfuls back to the Bank. Also
lurking below ground are no fewer than 40 ghost stations: disused Tube stops,
their eerily empty platforms briefly glimpsed from passing trains.
Or are they deserted? Some had — perhaps still have — very active afterlives,
if rumour can be believed. The Down Street station, between Green Park and
Hyde Park Corner, was used as an underground Cabinet Room during the war.
The never-officially-opened Bull and Bush, its entrance half-concealed on
Hampstead Heath, is said to be the nerve centre controlling the floodgates
that would be swiftly closed if the Thames ever broke into the Tube. But at
one time it was also claimed to be the mysterious “Paddock”, the Government’s
subterranean control room in the early 1940s. Two things fuelled this enduring
urban myth: the reference in Churchill’s memoirs to a bunker “near Hampstead”
(which would be a strange description of the well-known bunker at Dollis Hill,
near Neasden); and the odd story of a man, walking on the Heath during the
war, who was startled to see the unmistakable figure of the great Winnie
emerging from what seemed to be a bush.
What’s certainly true is that some Tube stations were equipped at that time
with deep-level “parallel” platforms, designed as bomb shelters on the
understanding that London Transport would be allowed to convert them into
express Tube lines later. Mysteriously, this plan was abandoned. Or was it?
Again, urban myth declares that there is indeed a parallel, express Northern
Line, but that commuters will never be allowed on it. It is reserved for when
VIPs have to be whisked out of London quickly and stealthily. (The urban myth
doesn’t reveal what they would do when they reached Morden.)
As for these deep-level parallel stations themselves, their fates are equally
intriguing. Eisenhower’s secret wartime headquarters, a vast, 32-storey
inverted skyscraper under Goodge Street Tube Station, is now used as secure
storage — allegedly for confiscated pornography, among other things. The fate
of the wartime shelter under Chancery Lane Tube Station is even more
intriguing. During the Cold War it was apparently converted into a very
unusual telephone exchange — one with a six-week supply of food, its own well,
and 12 miles of tunnels extending across London. That would have withstood an
atom bomb attack, but not an H-bomb, so it was scrapped. The saloon-bar
experts tell me that something even vaster, deeper and spookier lies under
Ludgate Hill. But the Chancery Lane “cavern” still remains off-limits.
So does the bulk of underground Westminster and Whitehall. Buildings such as
the Ministry of Defence are said to resemble icebergs: seven-eighths below the
surface, and all connected by a warren of tunnels stretching to Buck Palace,
Charing Cross and God knows where else. Or so a man told me at a party.
Not all of underground London is secret. You can wade into the cathedral-like
caverns of Joseph Bazalgette’s sewers if you want. And some resolute aesthetes
do, admiring what is said to be the world’s best Victorian brickwork.
Unsurprisingly, however, there is no comprehensive map of subterranean London.
Not in the public domain anyway. The engineers building the Jubilee Line
Extension reputedly had to submit their proposed route under Parliament Square
time and time again, never being told the reasons for its rejection, until by
a process of elimination they found the one passage that (presumably) didn’t
send trains crashing into Blair’s war room or MI5’s interrogation cells.
But what’s to become of the tunnel we do know about — the now mothballed Mail
Rail? Call me biased, but I think it should be converted into a dedicated
cycle track, providing us Lycra loonies with a safe, fast, dry route across
London. Either that, or it will have to become the world’s longest, deepest
bowling alley.
