London’s secret network of underground tunnels provide a physical history of the nuclear war that never was.
Thousands pass it each day: an anonymous black security door on an alleyway leading off Chancery Lane in London. Just ten years ago, the world behind this door was protected by the highest level of state secrecy, as was the disappearance of hundreds of men and women through it each day, down to a complex 60 metres beneath the pavement ready and waiting for nuclear war.
In the UK, the ruins of World War III are all around us: bricked-up doorways across the tube network, tower blocks like Pear Tree House in South London, sitting on top of the windowless concrete of a Civil Defence Control Centre. Hundreds of town halls, libraries and even schools built in the 1950s and ’60s retain their bunkers. Some are more classified than others. The warren beneath Chancery Lane was constructed in 1942 using non-English speakers to protect its identity. Codenamed “Kingsway”, it offered accommodation for up to 8,000 people but, in truth, was reserved for select individuals whose survival of a nuclear explosion was considered essential. Sections of this government “citadel” were taken over in 1944 by MI6’s opaque Inter Services Research Bureau, before being incorporated into the General Post Office’s equally shadowy “Scheme 3245” which saw the tunnels secretly extended beneath the city centre to form the hub of a deep-level, nuclear-proof communications network. At the peak of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, on-site staff locked themselves in the tunnels for two weeks, dependent on underground facilities including the bunker’s own artesian well, before surfacing again. Kingsway formed a crucial part of the nation’s defence against Soviet attack, but no guided tours stop here, no information boards record the discreet heroism of those who manned it. Even with wars that did materialise, we do not like to dwell on fear, let alone paranoia. And this is a paranoia hidden behind the Official Secrets Act; the exchange’s classified status survived well into the 1990s. Like so much cold war infrastructure, it passed out of existence before ever fully passing into it.
A few years ago I began researching London’s secret tunnels for a novel I wanted to write, and soon became obsessed. I wasn’t alone: in recent years a shelf-worth of books on the capital’s buried networks have appeared, from Stephen Smith’s Underground London, Peter Ackroyd’s London Under, Fiona Rule’s London’s Labyrinth and, most recently, Nick Catford’s Secret Underground London, drawing on his involvement in Subterranea Britannica, an organisation studiously devoted to archiving the man-made underworld. Learning about subterranean London is a thrill akin to discovering a conspiracy theory in physical form: the familiar world gains a new dimension, one to which you now have privileged access. To know, as you cross Finsbury Park towards a horizon of Perfect Fried Chicken, that beneath your feet are the vaulted brick catacombs of an underground Victorian reservoir, or to see the office workers in Victoria, Westminster and Camden hurrying over the tops of nuclear-proof command centres, lends the everyday landscape a new depth of focus.
Read the full article here: https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/5126/the-brink-of-armageddon