Morning:
9°c
You know those dreams where you find yourself in a familiar house only it contains more rooms than you thought, and rooms come off rooms, passages open out into chambers and before you know it you have strayed somewhere else altogether?
London can be like that. Last week, I walked though a bombproof door on Furnival Street in Holborn and took a lift 100ft down to a vast subterranean world that few Londoners know exists.
These are the Kingsway Tunnels, a secret underground bunker over a mile long that its present owner, BT, has just put up for sale. Built originally as the Chancery Lane public bomb shelter in the Blitz, the lair was taken over by MI6 until the end of the war, before the Public Record office took residency and finally the GPo (BT as it was then known) bought it up and extended the network of chambers and passages in 1956.
It became the Kingsway telephone exchange, the most secure in Britain. Broken circuit boards and a framed Factories Act of 1944 bear witness to it now. Rumour has it that MI6 sealed it off, manned, for a fortnight during the Cuban missile crisis - but fact recalls that until the mid-Nineties some 150 telephone engineers worked here daily. There was a snooker hall, a canteen, a bar and a tropical fish tank.
Still, it remained secret. The supervisor who led our tour claims those who built it were shipped in, spoke no English and had no idea where they were working as a precaution. Even now, displaying a level of secrecy that suggests the war never ended, he refuses to reveal exactly which street it lies under. An electrical diagram on the wall for some reason incorporates the old newspaper offices on Fleet Street. Was this place used for wiretapping journalists? of course, the temptation is to sneak off away from the group and explore the tunnels by myself - "oi! Don't open that door!" I am told, though, whenever I slip away. or is that a red herring?
Tar seeps through the walls. Central line trains rumble past, unnervingly close. It will take any prospective buyer at least £5 million to render the space suitable for commercial use: storing bullion, say. or something else ...
I say the Punchdrunk theatre company should turn it into a living art installation. or an eccentric billionaire could act out weird fantasies down here. or Dr Strangelove's vision for a postnuclear society could become reality!
Excuse me. Must be the lack of daylight.
