A Nuclear Bunker at Chancery Lane (Tales from the Tube Episode 10)
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- čas přidán 9. 09. 2024
- Did you know there’s a nuclear bomb shelter under High Holborn? Never say I don’t do nothin’ for ya.
For more deep-level shelter shenanigans: • Clapham South and the ...
ko-fi.com/jago...
/ jagohazzard
‘...head to Chancery Lane, I’ll see you at the Bar’ -> an unintended pun?
Heh, I never thought of that.
I worked there (called Kingsway Truck Switching Centre or colloquially to those who worked there, simply "the Tunnel") from 1971 to about 1982 when it closed down. I was one of those strange ones who worked in the mysterious RI (Radio Interference) department at the far end of the repeater station. The office itself was located about 200 feet below Holborn Circus. It was great down there and a lovely community of around 200 at its height. The restaurant was good and led through to the games room and bar (called the Cock and Pussy). The head honcho there was one Ken Burchell, who was a great guy and eventually retired to become a postmaster at a Post Office at Hatfield Peverel in Essex and then eventually moving to Norfolk. It was sort of secret place though staff were allowed to bring their children down at Christmas time for a party. It was a great adventure for the little ones. Happy days!
I worked there too.
@@TheKelvincurrie Yes and I remember you! For about a year I left RI and worked in the repeater station (1977 I think) before going back. You were there then?
It does seem that site was temporarily occupied, possibly by the MoD, when PINDAR was under construction.
The Subbrit website has a good short history on Kingsway - www.subbrit.org.uk/sites/kingsway-telephone-exchange/
I think the best Xmas party as a kid was one year at Ashford railwaymen's club they held a party for the kids of railwaymen and ol' Peter Parker came in dressed as Santa. My kid brother ruined the atmos when seeing my prized Star Trek annual I'd got given, he decided he didn't want the football annual he got from Santa and created such a ruckus and I had to surrender my annual to the git grr Got it back through simple elder brother thuggery but it was never quite the same.
Got any keys to go down and find out what alarm is going off ? I remember all the Step by Step exchange equipment being removed here too in Adelaide
Used to use the tunnels for storing office furniture and equipment in the 90s after closure ... the staff restaurant had faux windows with cows and country scenes painted on the walls!
I'm sorry I'm rather late to the party, so to speak. I only found your Tales from the Tube purely by accident. I'm currently working my way through them as I write. Keep up the excellent work!
The subtitles are unintentionally hilarious - "... the lowest dive in London and there was an artesian well and a stock of Russians..." - I thought they didn't want the Russians in there?
Norman Wisdom used to work at Kingsway. He was a telephonist during the war and used to connect Churchill regularly. In fact, when Churchill saw the first Norman film, he was surprised and pleased to see him.
I’ve previously commented and am about to again after landing back at this wonderful video.
I was part of the team that readied the tunnels for sale in 2006 ... it had been advertised then ... the main problem that made it ‘unsalable’ was the liabilities that came with the tunnels - responsibility lies with the owners for any damaged caused due to tunnel failure. This always turned off potential buyers.
I don’t know whether Telereal (the company I worked for at the time that ‘managed’ the tunnels on behalf of BT) ever did get a buyer ... I understand at the time it was taken off the market as it was too ‘hard to sell!’
Additionally it is reputed to be haunted. The service tunnel that leads to chancery lane station has an old ‘engineer’ residing there that looks after the complex!
The old advice us cold war warriors were told was to find your local Lloyds bank if you were caught on the hop and the sneaky Soviet's dropped something nasty on us as apparently a great many town and rural branches had emergency shelters you could egress into with the application of a running code word which was quite common knowledge. I did know about the bunker there as I often when working for the law society got to go over to Chancery Lane HQ from Red Lion St and got to know a few people and one said about the secret squirrels that used to lurk beneath. My ol' mum was "appointed" for a place but she told 'em to give it to someone else being one that didn't like the idea of surviving post melty flashy disaster event. My late father when at Orpington A signal box was trained for the not so secret er secret Railway Command Bunker there, saw that as a kid too as he often took me to work nights with him at Orp A and he had to go in to this strange giant platelayers hut and sign off on books etc he had read and pick up any new rules books for the coming time.
To describe it as a telephone exchange is wrong. It never was. It was a trunk switching centre with many highly sensitive communication nodes. It also housed a rubidium standard clock accurate to 1 second on 20,000 years. There was much more to this place than anyone realised.
Lowest dive in London, brilliant!
I worked there in the 1980's!
'Deep level', as it was known on the GPO/British Telecom, was a fascinating world and 'KIngsway' exchange the most fascinating of all. (Incidentally, it was named Kingsway to be deliberately misleading. As the video says, it was a state secret up until 1967 and its existance would have been denied).
When I worked there, the 'car phone' exchange was based there - the radio based, very unreliable and extremely expensive forerunner of the mobile phone network. It was a strange place, VERY deep (The central line rumble was far above your head) and the guys who worked there seemed content to stay down there during their lunch breaks, using their own bar and canteen rather than coming up for fresh air and sunshine.
The tunnels leading away from there formed a network that linked all the major telephone exchange sites in London, lined with cables and always mindful of the danger of gas, explosive and toxic, so you were always accompanied by guys with detection equipment ...they really has the easiest job in the world!
That’s interesting stuff! None of the sources I found mentioned the detection guys - perhaps the urban explorers who occasionally break in should be aware of that before they do so...
@@JagoHazzard The detection guys always had to accompany you if you worked down in the deep level network but not in Kingsway itself, as they monitored their own air.
The dectection staff was based at Wood Street, Moorgate and nothing was ever done in a hurry. A days notice was needed for them to meet you at the top of a lift shaft at one of the exchanges and then down we'd go, the detection guys pulling along a little bleeeping machine that detected explosive or asphyxiating gas.
As the deep level network was below everything else, heavier than air gases such as methane would eventually seep down there so it really was a big deal. The detection guys knew 'hot spots' where gas would settle and became quite animated as we got close.
They would also turn the lights on and off as we walked the tunnels, with a detection syytem coming on too that apparently would turn off lights as the gas level went up (I never saw this but a mate did and it was 'abandon ship' as they spotted the lights going out away down in the distance!).
A map was needed as it was easy to get lost down there, though the detection guys were very familiar with it all. They also changed the dead light bulbs as they went along too ;-)
The tunnels were like the iron cast segment tunnels you find on the tube only much smaller. say 9 foot diameter? Both sides would be lined with racks full of thick telephone cables with a narrow path down the centre to walk through. A third of Londons phone calls at any time were going through the deep level cables, showing the need for it.
Today the netork remains but many of the exchanges have gone (Fleet telex echange on Farringdon Street for example) and all the thick copper cables have been removed for scrap, with just a few fibre optic cables remaining that are not much thicker than your thumb and never go faulty.
I bet the Moorgate guys are still there though!
@@jimtuite3451 All BT Personnel had to sign the official secrets act. I thought Kingsway was outwith the GPO being on the Govt comms network, or did that happen after privatisation or BT?
@@highpath4776 I joined in 1983 when British Telecom was still nationalised so I remember signing the official secrets act on day one. By then though, Kingsway was no longer a 'secret' and nothing I have said isn't already in the public domain anyway?
@@jimtuite3451 I was not thinking of any one bit of information as such. Its more complex than that, we know that ( forget name) chap from Dolis Hill research that worked on binary switching for Bletchley Park in WW2 using GPO standard components and invented the programmable computer was told by (MoD? MI something) to destroy the device after the war as they did not want Americans (and Russians) to know the UK Codebreaking capabiltity. However both USA and Manchester University quickly developed Computers (Via slightly different technology) that matched the Bletchley Capabilities , its possible Britain missed out on earlier commercial applications by restricting development post WW2. I have long viewed that the only people that dont know Britains Official Secrets are its citizens, every other country seems to know them quite well !
A lot of these WW2 structures were adapted for the atom bomb age. The advent of the H-Bomb made them likely to be destroyed. Even the Government had given up on their Corsham bunker by the mid 60's.
This is quickly becoming one of my favorite channels of all time!
I did a fire risk assessment down there about 10 years ago or so, when it was up for sale and they were busily trying to remove all the asbestos. Lots of very old kit down there, and still evidence of artifacts from the war. The snooker tables were still down there too!
Years ago me and some friends took a field trip to an odd, old tunnel under a stretch of freeway in San Diego. The reason for the interest was that from the street you could see it was labeled as a civil defense site. It was pretty much ninety degrees to the coast, where any nukes would be aimed to target our fleet. It was a wide tunnel, and had some oddness in the middle. Sadly we hadn't bright enough light to really see it. It was fun though.
I'm a day late and a dollar short for this question, but maybe...... Where is/was the tunnel located? I lived in San Diego from '63 through '92. And now I'm curious about the tunnel.
Me in 2020: See you at the bar
Me in 2700, World War 16: Back at war are we lad?
I was able to go down there, probably around 2005, when were looking at it as a potential site for something else - it was a fascinating day down there.
The writer Peter Laurie, in his very interesting 1979 book 'Beneath the City Streets' covers in some depth the deep shelters, hardened comms, citadels, food stores and other aspects of the State's attempts to protect itself (though not especially the rest of us) from destruction in WW2 and the Cold War. Of the 9 deep shelters built along the Northern and Central line, all but the 2 on the latter are visible by their conspicuous brick stair/ lift heads, whereas for the Central Line 2, Chancery Lane and nearby St Pauls, access is not quite so visible. Laurie was unsuccessfully prosecuted for his book but he was able to show that his revelations were deductions made from published sources and from using his eyes whilst walking the streets.
Yes i was down there in 1971 Bert Rickard was my AEE at the time home made beer under his desk the red barrel club .
I worked for several years in Furnival Street and never knew anything about that building and didn’t take any notice of it. Only buildings that was of interest at the time for me were the Castle Pub and the Burger King (now long gone). However, despite the road being a high security area because of the Jewish Chronicle being located on the street, the street did make the news in 1992 when the IRA planted a bomb at number 10. Although there was some damage to the building it was the building opposite that took the full brunt and was eventually demolished.
Love you're innovative inserts.. eg Postman's Pat, kid with blown mind.. just what makes such a serious subject so enjoyable
I can't help but think what a wonderful location these facilities would be for long term safe data storage.
And that is exactly what many cold War shelters, command bunkers and facilities are now used for!
There is one in a field very close to me, it still has its cold War level of security and only the one way in.
Great repurposing.
Wine merchants, too, like these old establishments for their fairly constant temperature and humidity
One in Cambridge, UK is getting a refurbishment right now as a long term storage. It's a wonderful brutalist relic of an atomic era
@@underwaterdick - Do you live near Monkton Farleigh near Bath, then?
a few old bunkers have been used by naughty people to grow the plants needed to make exotic rothmans or herbal woodbines.
I always find all this cold war stuff scarily fascinating. Nice "Threads" reference. Still can't bring myself to rewatch that, far too depressing.
Anyway, nice work as always.
Threads is why I moved here - if you think the covid toilet roll shortage was bad, wait til that bomb drops - like Watson's ol' mum, I'm going in the first wave.
I love the licenced bar 200 ft underground! The lowest dive in London you say. To be honest, it probably didn't attract many customers because it didn't have the right atmosphere. Thank you and good night.
Relevant, irreverent and informative. I love these videos.
I worked in Kingsway for 2 years in the late 1960s and never thought I would see it again!!!
A telephone call is like sms, except you have to answer and talk, and you can't go back and read the conversation later.
I can't believe anything as important as The Hotline would be routed through the heart of London. That's just amazing.
It surprised me too. I guess they just thought it should be close to government.
@@JagoHazzard It kind of reminds me of the famous signs in Essex that read "Secret Nuclear Bunker."
Just found this video. Two things that might be of interest is that one of the emergency escape routes was onto one of the platforms of Chancery Lane. The other is that everyone thinks of the "Hot Line" being a telephone line. It was not, it was in fact a teleprinter circuit. If you wonder why it was through here then the reason is simple. As you say in your video, it was the termination point of TAT-1.
Those signs were put up by the farmer who owns the land the bunker was built under, The bunker was linked into the GPO network by underground cables running back to the Ongar telephone exchange (tenous central line tube connection!) which is situated in Banson's Lane opposite Sainsbury's car park for those familiar with the area. That exchange building and the capacity of its standby power generating plant is larger than a small local exchange would normally warrant, because it was designed to be able to support the operation of the government command bunker.
Excuse my ignorance, but wouldn't it have to be as the PM wouldn't always be outside London when needing to make the call?
The Canteen, Bar & Snooker tables are a nice touch ! The same existed at many long - gone civil service buildings. The site would also make a tolerable vaccine center , for holding with its elecrical power or dosing. Keep Safe !
I love that if you use google streetview the noise complaint is still affixed to the doors of 39 Furnival Street 🙂
Fantastic stuff - the Cold War has left us with some quite peculiar relics!
"In the event World War III does break out."
I see what you did there ;)
Small side issue. The Russians had a couple of shops in High Holborn directly on top of it - opposite the Old Red Lion. One selling photographic equipment (cheaper, but not as good as the East German equivalent) and one selling Russian dolls and similar craft tat. I still have and occasionally use a twin-lens reflex Lubitel bought there. I presume more was going on there than was obvious, but that the authorities were also watching it closely.
It was never sold-liability in the event of collapse was cost-prohibitive.
Some of the tunnel LinIngs were stamped ‘LRT’, some GPO after the tunnels were extended. There is a direct connection between the tunnels (through an air shaft) and chancery lane tube complex.
The tunnels are also reputed to be haunted!
The connection to Chancery Lane Tube was an emergency escape route.
This is fascinating must have walked past this site hundreds of times, the exchange exterior looks exactly like one in Kensington. Makes you think what lurks beneath that building. I thought Dollis Hill was the government's central exchange. Excellent research, amazed you found pictures of it.
"the lowest bar in London" hilarious
As featured in the James Herbert novel ‘Domain’.
They look like tube tunnels, in the two different sizes for running lines and station tunnels, with the metal lining segments. Which I guess makes sense, as how else would you build them? A pity they didn't put them somewhere useful that could be turned into a new tube line later. Not that far from the proposed 1970s Fleet Line route though?
But he'll see the big [switch]board!!!
The way to protect communications in the early days of the cold war from atomic bombs was to bury infrastructuure deep, bulky expensive cable, analogue exchanges, etc underground. The costs were astronomical. By the time the systems were complete the much more powerful H bombs were in use rendering much communication infrastructure vulnerable anyway. If you were around during the cold war wondering why your home telephone installation was so expensive about half of public consumer bills went towards the military costs of the communication system. My first home phone connection cost over £50 in 1971 (my gross salary was £80 a month) and quarterly bills were around £30 with careful use. Waiting lists of a year or more were common. The forerunner of today's green levy and stealth taxes?
Great video! Nice link to Threads
It’s a film that had quite an impact, I thought I’d pay tribute.
Not going to lie, I only watched it for the first time a few days ago. Not an easy film to watch, especially due to the fact I used to live near Sheffield and my current understanding of nuclear technology.
As you said that comment really blew my mind. I had to take a couple of tablets and have a lay down.
God the GPO Telephone department was rubbish in the 70s. 6 months wait to get a landline phone if I remember correctly.
I'm down the rabbit hole of tube tales...
The automatically generated subtitles are hilarious: instead of "a stock of rations" it generates "a stock of Russians". I found that very confusing, considering it was a Cold War secret. Although, knowing the KGB, it would have made sense.
Patrolling Chancery Lane makes you wish for a nuclear winter...
Had a wonder round here during a lunch break. Worked on Giltspur St near the Viaduct pub before we moved to Smithfield. Central London is a cool place indeed!
If the center HAD been under a nuclear attack, that would mean that it was already waaay too late to use the phone line between Washington and Moscow!😄😄😄
I think the same could be said of a lot of these precautions. Really, the main thing you need is a pamphlet outlining the main religions to help you decide which one is for you as the nukes approach.
i only have to walk 10 mins haha
Postman Pat and his black and white cat were real then! hence the photo
This place is possibly the bunker explored by Beno, although he does not give its location - but if it is, here is a half hour tour of it
czcams.com/video/OH-L5nHLNvc/video.html
It is.
So basically its a real life fallout vault
Yes, but lower budget and the only outfit you can get is a demob suit.
I can’t think I’d want to survive a nuclear war. I’m sure that Americans pronounce it nucular though. Probably aluminum brains 🧠
I worked down " the tunnel " in 1964 as a G.P.O. apprentice. We spent many hours exploring all the small cable tunnels leading to the deep level sub floors in Faraday and Kelvin House..
The central line ran directly above the games room shown on the map. I seem to recall that there were two full size snooker tables there.
The main entrance was next to the Alfred Marks employment bureau in High Holborn. There were two others, one in Furnival Street and one in Tooks Court now demolished.