Explore Everything by Bradley Garrett

Author:Bradley Garrett [Garrett, Bradley L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78168-187-9
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2013-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

The crew was let off with a warning from police officers, who told them that they knew what the group had been up to, and with the royal wedding of Kate Middleton and Prince William taking place in just over a month, they advised us to stay out of the underground – police would be placed in the sewers and lids welded because of the LCC’s nightly activities.58

Silent UK was the first to post the story of the Mail Rail on their blog. It hit a number of major news providers within hours and went viral, pulling in millions of hits across the globe and crashing the website. The LCC was splashed all over the Internet for weeks, leading to another backlash from the wider community as well as dejection among the crew as people realised that the list of places left to explore was dwindling, and the pressure on authorities to stop us was increasing based on the information the police had relayed at the Mail Rail bust. A few explorers made comments to the effect that London was ‘rinsed’ now, that there was nothing left. But Patch argued that ‘there will always be more to explore; this isn’t about places, it’s about experiences, and those aren’t finite resources’.

Soon after, the crew found our way into the Kingsway Telephone Exchange and British Telecom (BT) deep-level tunnels. These tunnels were originally built as air raid shelters under Chancery Lane, then sold to the General Post Office (GPO) in 1949, when they became the termination for the first transatlantic phone cable. The tunnels stretched for miles, only had three surface entrances and supposedly once contained a bar for workers on their off hours – rumoured, at sixty metres down, to be the deepest bar in the United Kingdom.

The crew found access through one of the shafts and spent eight hours wandering around in it, knowing they were being recorded by CCTV in the deep-level sections, the risk well worth the reward. A few in the group argued that the Kingsway Telephone Exchange was the third and greatest grail the LCC had grabbed, being one of the most secure and sensitive of a trio of telephone exchanges sites in Britain, the others being Anchor Exchange in Birmingham and Guardian Exchange in Manchester.

However, shockingly, we were not exactly the first explorers to see the Kingsway tunnels, which sort of disqualified it as a grail. Who did see it first is a bizarre piece of urban exploration history.

The tunnels into Kingsway were being adapted secretly by the UK government in 1951. However, as journalist Duncan Campbell writes in his book War Plan UK, ‘the secrecy of the new government project did not last long – a report of the “Secret network of tunnels” appeared on the front page of the Daily Express in September 1951.’59 The Daily Express then issued a second article suggesting that new tunnels were being dug under Whitehall. The Cabinet Office called a meeting with MI5 officials, GPO employees and

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