The Secrets of Underground Britain - HIDDEN HISTORY

since the dawn of time man has found refuge underground skeletons cave drawings and ancient tools tell of our ancestors using caverns for shelter and as hiding places as man became more adept at engineering he was able to dig deeper and construct bigger and better underground structures from Smuggler's passages to hidden fortresses from Forgotten mines to wartime bunkers discover the secrets you were never supposed to know travel to the places you were never supposed to see in the secrets of underground britain travel back through time to discover tales of Britain's hidden caves forgotten catacombs and mysterious tunnels unearth the tale of edinburgh secret underground city once the home to almost a million people and thought to be lost forever reveal the mysteries of the Hellfire caves uncover secret tunnels that exist beneath the city of Liverpool and journey below the crowded pavements of Brighton to discover a staggering network of Victorian sewers but first travel back to a time when tunnels and caves provided safe storage for one of Britain's oldest and most illegal pursuits the art of smuggling there are smugglers caves all around Britain and this museum in Hastings contains many clues to show what the life of a smuggler was actually like during that 17 1800s there was over 40,000 people employed in the smuggling trade just on the south coast alone probably the most famous smuggling gang of all operated which was the whole curse gang whole curse is a little village about 15 miles from Hastings but they basically they joined up with a few other gangs the Hastings gang in the gold Hearst to form on the largest smuggling gangs in history there are over five six hundred strong at the time and they were basically a gang of murderous thugs I mean they would make the Mafia like Pussycats nowadays they ran basically from London down and they stretched all over the south coast right down to Paul and they got to such a stage where they didn't even bother doing their smuggling runs at night they were so confident nobody would interfere and they put terror into hearts of people that they would actually run their smuggling goods during broad daylight in 1700 a British farm labourer would earn about 7 shillings a week but for One Nights work carrying barrels from the shore up to and into the smugglers caves he could net 10 shillings over a week's wages and this pub in San Agnes Cornwall like many in this part of the country still has a secret passage that once ran from behind the bar two caves on the shore below but it wasn't just wreckers rogues and dishonest sailors that were involved in smuggling in 1780 the right honourable temple literal a member of parliament built this classic Georgian folly on the shore of the Solent near South Hampton inside a secret passage runs from the basement to a door that leads onto the shore rumours circulated that he was a prolific smuggler and the true purpose of the building was to allow his men to keep a lookout from the top of the turret whilst others landed the contraband probably the most ingenious of all the gangs was the audience and gang which was a place in the early 1800s the gentleman called George ramsley now he ran it a bit more like a business he employed an accountant and the secretary which was actually son he also employed foreign suppliers he had his own fleet of ships and he also employed laborers to take the smuggled goods to the hiding places in the early 17th century the punishment for smuggling was imprisonment or if you wanted to avoid that fate you could agree to be inducted into the Royal Navy which was believed to be an even harsher sentence however these punishments failed to deter the gangs from continuing their wicked trade and by the 18th century the penalty for smuggling was death the history of these caves in Hastings is not just related to smuggling during the Napoleonic Wars they were also used as a hospital another strange secret can be found in this place it's a chapel deep underground who built it and who worshiped here and even who they worshiped is still unknown to this day it's said to have been sent Clement but it certainly predates the modern naming of the caves and if you have a closer look at the statue it I think it actually looks quite pagan it actually looks more like the god Pan if you haven't got the shaggy legs and the pointy bits on the forehead and the four tiers I would imagine it dates back probably to those times but not all tunnels are located on our coastlines many are buried beneath Britain's busiest towns and cities in Exeter Devon shoppers go about their business many blissfully unaware that they're walking over an ancient set of tunnels originally dug in the 14th century these passengers originally housed lead pipes the carried fresh water into the city in the 17th century amid the English Civil War Exeter was held by parliamentary forces and the tunnels were partially blocked to prevent royalist storming the city at the same time much of the lead pipes were ripped out and melted down to be reused as bullets leaving the tunnels empty and redundant in Royston hartfordshire there are a set of tunnels said to be excavated and decorated by the ancient order of the Knights Templar warrior monks who protected pilgrims traveling to the holy lands though outlawed in the 14th century their legacy lives on today a group claiming to be modern-day Templars have claimed another network of tunnels running beneath the streets of Hartford as their own and have issued death threats to anyone foolhardy enough to enter their subterranean lair further north lies one of Britain's most elaborate underground secrets buried deep beneath the streets of modern Edinburgh for almost 250 years a giant defensive wall surrounded Edinburgh unable to expand its boundaries it became the most densely populated city in Europe multi-story tenements were built to alleviate the crisis but they were an unsightly scar on the city's skyline and the decision was taken to build over them a series of bridges were erected one on top of another to even add the lay of the land around the Royal Mile creating flat smart streets the space inside the newly built arches were converted into workshops from where cobblers and other artisans toiled however over time they became occupied by a very different type of inhabitant over a million of the city's poorest and most dispossessed live within this city beneath a city surrounded by darkness and misery they were ignored by the chroniclers of the time later the tunnels were bricked up and deliberately forgotten the rich and powerful of the day did a remarkable job of denying that this underworld city had ever existed but recent exploration has provided fascinating insights into this subterranean hellhole but what remains of this city today they discovered that some pieces of old raw materials little shoes from the cobbled room bottles the usual sort of artifact you would expect there when you excavate somewhere where legal businesses have actually worked the headed for the vaults was 1788 - 1796 as far as this area is concerned there would have been about 30 to 40 people working in about ten rooms down here when the engineers designed Edinburgh Southbridge they actually forgot to damp-proof it against the rain and of course you know it never rains in Edinburgh so water coming down to this level became an issue so by 1796 within eight years of actual opening of the Southbridge the legal businesses that work down here started to leave and this process is more or less completed by about 1800 all the legal businesses leave that of course leaves a void and coming down here to fill the void all the criminal classes of Edinburgh so suddenly the bolts become a place of higher levels of criminality gambling dens and drinking dens and of course drugs in those days absinthe opium laudanum squatters people would come down here to spend the night down here and then go back out onto the streets of Edmonton the morning begging and stealing so the whole place is sordid and violent people obviously being attacked with knives people are being tight with bottles people came down here as I said we're never seen again and we've got a couple of examples of ghosts you are said to have been people who make their ends down here historically Edinburgh is notorious for body snatching the most infamous practitioners of this foul trade being Birkin hair experts believe that the snatch bodies were stored here before being sold to doctors who used the corpses for anatomy demonstrations a tunnel leads from this chamber directly to Edinburgh old medical college this hideous trade and other dark deeds that took place in this chilling labyrinth have left their mark and many believe the tunnels are haunted by a series of ghosts of all the haunted rooms down here this is the most haunted this is the caretakers room and it's the residence of the most malevolent interactive spirit down here and that's the watcher he is the most malevolent spirit down here your presence here is disrespectful this is offensive he is the spirit down here is most likely to attack you by the 19th century this warren of crime and disease was an embarrassing saw on the face of edinburgh the government of the time decided to brick the tunnels up many believe that the plague broke out here and they buried hundreds of pox-ridden souls beneath its streets whilst edinburgh secretly housed the poorest and most dispossessed members of society hundreds of miles south in leafy Buckinghamshire the activities of a gang of Britain's most noble and wealthy men would cause a scandal that reverberates to this day Sir Francis Dashwood English rake politician and once Chancellor of the Exchequer formed a group that was later to be called the Hellfire Club the members reputedly hired prostitutes to dress up as nuns and conducted mock religious rituals over the bodies of naked our stoke r attic ladies originally the Hellfire Club met in a ruined Abbey on the banks of the Thames but their activities quickly became the subject of gossip so they adjourned to the privacy of these caves in Tosh woods estate the caves stretch for over a mile into the hillside and there is rumored to be a secret passage leading from the caves to the church on top of the hill however no one has been able to locate it but a series of Roman numerals carved into one of the walls are said to be a clue to the entrance as is this poem take 20 steps and rest a while then take a pic and find a style where once I did my love beguile - as 22 in - woods time perhaps to hide this cell divine where lay my love in peace sublime strange carvings of screaming faces are etched upon the walls and at the bottom of the caves runs an underground river named the Styx after the mythical River that souls must cross to enter hell while Sir Francis - words on his autocratic friends built his underground playground for fun other underground passages can be found from the tip of Cornwall to the hills of Wales from the coasts of Kent to the Morse of Yorkshire that ever darker and more blood-stained history it's not the history of the aristocrats but of the poor working-class man who toiled in the dark day after day week after week in britain's minds sometimes the tell-tale ruins of picturesque pumping stations will give away the fact that there a series of underground mines nearby in other places these have crumbled away to almost nothing and if you are not careful you may stumble upon a mineshaft plunging vertically deep into the ground I'm a hundred and fifty feet underground at the wheel roots mining Cornwall and you can see the dark cramped and wet conditions the miners had spurred up then work for about eight to ten hours a day the men would have obviously climbing down wooden ladder ways to where they were working some of the ladder ways in Cornwall would have been over a thousand feet the boys from the age of eight or nine would have worked down here they'd work for six or eight hours a day and again climbing downward ladder ways to where they would have been working usually working running water very dangerous conditions using explosives which again were very dangerous to use and mainly using hand tools / drilling and breaking the rock up but it isn't just in Cornwall that you can stumble upon secret underground worlds it was the first quarry I have discovered purely by chance with it with a friend of mine way back in the mid-1960s and we were just playing in the woods at Browns folly and he found a crevasse in the rock a small gap in the rock climbed in behind this rock cleared a few boulders out of the way and gradually as we cleared the boulders we found the corridor we were in was bigger and bigger and found ourselves eventually in this huge network of underground workings which he later found out I was old abandoned Victorian quarry workings which extended over so like 300 acres you know the corridors disappearing in the distance in all directions quarter mile a half mile long it was unbelievable but that as we found out later was only a small part of it a weed fennmont and finally mine which was about three or four hundred acres I suppose but around the whole of North wilts you know in the area that I know well there were literally thousands of acres all of the fields in North Wiltshire are undermined by the disre betwwen of warnet worked out quarry workings wren about hundred feet underground and is not just empty tunnels that can be found in Britain's mines many still have machinery and tools left intact undisturbed for decades as if time itself had Stood Still there's nothing more exhilarating than going into a mind and finding machinery still there and before I got interested in the underground I was interested in water mills and windmills and to go into an underground mine and find underground water wheels which powered all the equipment in the mine is it something that's it's rare one of the most spectacular ways of obtaining power was via underground water wheels and one of the finest examples is in the estrade a non copper mine in North Wales you go to the bottom of the shaft you've got workshops there you've got lathes you've got tools and you've got this massive waterwheel still there where where it was placed in the earlier 20th century and it was an amazing sight to get into this old miners workshop 350 foot below ground as you can imagine you know having to go that far down not many people actually get to go there that is probably one of the most interesting underground places I've been to in the United Kingdom anyone who was interested in exploring a mind and shouldn't go in by themselves and before they contemplate going into any abandoned workings they should look into mine rescue organizations or caving organisations to learn about the mines accompli many of the techniques used by the miners down here were often developed by engineers in a military context at the start of the 19th century napoleon bonaparte at waist a brilliant campaign and was master of europe he had a hundred and sixty thousand men stationed at purloined and had ordered a fleet of barges to transport them across to England over the channel in Dover thousands of British soldiers needed to be housed to face this French threat within the iconic white cliffs a series of tunnels passages and barracks were constructed worming their way deep into the white chalk work started on this underground fortress in 1806 it was designed to house as many as 2,000 troops and was part of a massive series of forts batteries and Martello towers that were constructed as a response to the very real fear of imminent invasion this particular system was built under the ramparts of Dover's famous castle one way to enter the barracks is down this unusual double spiral staircase it allows two columns of troops to ascend or descend simultaneously a classic example of ingenious engineering the tunnels bored out of Dover's famous white chalk lead to a series of massive brick lined barracks called casemates originally built as part of the overflow barracks at Dover Castle and probably planned out by a brigadier Colonel William Twist who did a lot of them part Napoleonic fortifications along this stretch of the coast line around the Napoleonic period originally opened up to house 2,000 men underground here their main use in the Napoleonic period was for a barracks for troops that would have been fighting in this area waiting for the Napoleonic invasion or going across to the Portugal France or Spain to actually fight against Napoleon Bonaparte over there they're built very solid constructions they're a parabolic arch at the top of the casemates which is a very strong shape and then the walls of the casemates can be anything up to eight courses of brick thick that's about three and a half feet or a metre of brick in the walls this come by at this combination of a very strong brick structure within a soft absorbent chalk cliff make them a great bomb-proof shelter which is why they were set out here in the first place the softchalk Wars proved to be an irresistible surface for troops and visitors to scroll a record of their passing the oldest piece of graffiti we have in the tunnels here is actually a woman's name which says Mary Ford 1807 and we've really no idea who Mary Ford could have been it's possible that she was the wife of another engineer who worked in this area a gentleman called William Ford who was another royal engineer who's in this area so possibly that's him but yes it's a great record of some of the people who've made the way through the Dover tunnels either heading off towards France to fight Napoleon Bonaparte's or from other periods of history as well fortunately for Mary Ford and her friends the invasion never materialized and the Duke of Wellington was soon pushing Napoleon's troops back across Europe the tunnels and passages subsequently lay unused for many years and from the tranquil grounds of the castle above you would never guess what secrets lay beneath after the Battle of Waterloo Europe was still in turmoil that then Prime Minister law Palmerston ordered even more forts and tunnels to defend us from a possible attack and Crown Hill fought in Plymouth is a classic example of his grand plan up here at ground level it's pretty much like any other force with thick walls and gun emplacements all around but its secrets lie underground where the architects and engineers of the day considered all the eventualities that just might occur you you this doorway leads to an underground passage which is called dis chemin de hond which literally means the way round now this runs right around the fort and allows the soldiers to get to any part of the fort which is under attack without having to expose themselves to enemy fire above-ground this was the cartridge store these are the ammunition boxes they're specially made there's ink lined as well to protect the shells now when the shells are needed that taken up through this little shoot up to where the gun emplacement is up above now if the gun emplacement was taking the direct hit hopefully the shells down here would be safe the last thing you want in a raging battle is to have a whole lot of ammunition go off on you I'm down here in the East Capponi a deep in the fort protected by massive walls on this pair of cannons now they would have been filled with hundreds of small metal balls and were designed to send waves of shot raking through the mass of any attackers in the ditch outside the fort on the outer perimeter of the fort lies this cramped and eerie tunnel it's a marvelous example of the lengths the engineer's went to to try and preempt all manner of potential assaults even if a battle was raging above down here all would be still and quiet due to the specific design of this remarkable tunnel it's called a counter mining gallery and men would stand here silently listening for the sound of an enemy soldier trying to mine unto the fort's defenses if they heard the sound of digging their job was either to try and break into the tunnel and attack the miners or place a large barrel of gunpowder above them and blow them up another legacy of our underground past can be found in the place names in many of our towns and cities names that refer to sites where prisons once stood prisons that would have housed deep dark cells fetid and dank beneath the ground on the south bank of the Thames you can still find clink Street the clink was an infamous prison that record show was in use as early as the 12th century by 1761 it was described as a dismal hole and it was burned to the ground during the Gordon riots of 1780 all that remains today is the streets name and a small museum telling the story of it's wretched past another infamous prison of that period was Newgate like the clink it was also attacked and the Gordon riots but the main building wasn't demolished until 1902 however if you visit the pub built on the site of the old prison and asked the barman nicely he might show you down to the cellar were amongst the barrels and pipes lay to cells all that remains of Newgate Prison tunnels passages and caverns are dotted all over the country but one of the most astonishing is here in the city of Liverpool famous for another type of cavern but further north in the city lies a mysterious warren of brick tunnels that have been looked after and restored by an eager group of volunteers many people in Edgehill knew the tongs were here but no one really bothered with and he just accepted them until we found out this City Council we're about to redevelop the area and we feared for the tunnels then so we formed this organization to try and protect and save them for future generations been doing it now for 10 years and let's all you see it excuse the pun a bit of light at the end of the throttle the tunnels were built for a merchant called Joseph Williamson he had married into the famous sugar family the Tate's and ran a brand to their business dealing with tobacco being a successful merchant in the city means we can still find his portrait in Liverpool's Walker art gallery the tunnels began their life somewhere around 1818 maybe a little bit beyond went Oh civilians and aside from where can came up here to Edgehill he spent approximately we gather around 100,000 pounds on these tunnels also the houses in Mesa Street that he built as well which were crater somewhere around 22 million today he employed soldiers returning from the polygon ik wars he gave them the way put bread on the table and they retained his favors with building such librarians as this giving the soldiers the work was most likely an act of philanthropy but why he wanted the tunnels dug is still a complete mystery the work earned Williamson the nickname the mole of Edgehill nobody knows why these tools were built we've tried to find some way of put some logic into these tunnel spaces we've just can't find so acting now we just accept that they're here when Lesnar's team started to explore Williamson's tunnels most were blocked by rubble and household rubbish dating back decades as they've cleared out the tunnels they've unearthed hundreds of fascinating artifacts they've also discovered that in places the tunnels are two or three stories deep all we know is this is the tip of an iceberg where we are now said drop in the ocean to what's around here somewhere and we really need to find them we really need help from anybody and everybody to get these songs found open door so the whales and let them see just what we got here Williamson's tiles and Liverpool are fascinating but they're not the only network of tunnels built by wealthy landowners v Duke of Portland built a network a labyrinth of tunnels at Welbeck Abbey in Staffordshire absolutely huge but they won't let us in somewhat smaller Whitley Park near Guildford there's a really very strange underground structure beneath the lake an underground ballroom and again that's currently under redevelopment and I'm afraid we can't get into that one either at the moment Whitley Park was developed by businessman named James Whittaker right in the 1890s though the structure is out of bounds today there are historians who not only knew about the room but also visited it in the past this is an illustration from the wrong magazine as 1920s and shows the tunnel which led under the water the underground room with Neptune on top and here is the level to which the water would ultimately come when the lake was refilled and this from the same magazine shows a gentleman smoking and it is said that there was a pipe which led up through Neptune through which any excess smoke could go this is a photograph I took in 2000 and shows the underground room now with a very yellow light that's due to the algae in its heyday trainee divers were brought here and they went down and cleaned the outside of the glass it was about 20 feet in diameter I have met some people whose parents went down there in the 1930s with a windup gramophone and had dancers but you can see here there's the tunnel going through to the bottom of the base and that's very interesting because the shape of that tunnel exactly reflects the shape which you now see if you stand on the Bakerloo line station and as Whittaker Wright was involved in the financing of the Bakerloo line in the 1890s we must assume that these were bits of tunneling that were accessed to requirements at the time going down there now it's fairly damp and dank darn darn it but it still has a certain amount of magic and you can imagine people in the old days when it was all clean and the there were lights in there and the fish coming outside and pressing their noses up against the glass as you'd see what was going on you can imagine we'd been absolutely magical place Whitley Park was just one manifestation of the attitude that flourished under the reign of Queen Victoria her Stern manner changed the way Britain viewed themselves both when alive and when dead the old church graveyards were full to bursting with god-fearing folk so Victorian entrepreneurs came up with a solution large fashionable landscapes cemeteries the first was built at Kenzel green in North London and the Victorians didn't stop with the usual monuments at ground level they also offered the public the chance to be laid to rest deep underground so which came first the catacombs or the cemetery up above all the cemetery very much so because London was overcrowd at this point in beginning of the 19th century and then you need two places to put people by about 1840 that was something like 40,000 people dying a year in London so you can well imagine the congestion in the city Church shops it was very lucky if you stayed at the ground as much as three months before they more or less came in dug you out put somebody else in on top sorry to say great deals not only had spades they also had chocolates to dispose of undecayed bits of body the usual practice was to dig a hole in the corner of the graveyard and then put that pieces in their coffins will be sold off for firewood and something really needed to be done about this chap that really took the challenge up in London was a chap named George Frederick carton when were the catacombs opened but they open a little bit later than cemetery which opened in 1833 obviously it took some time to build them they these ones basically opened in 1838 they're very extensive they've got a space here for something like four thousand coffins and date it's about three quarters for the Churchill's only added up to less than ten acres in total there were seven of these so-called magnificent seven cemeteries and opened from 1833 can degree right through to 1841 and in total they added up to 300 acres which is a vast difference from less than ten so you can see this made enormous difference to London would you want to be very good I think they're rather nice down here and there's some talk about we whitewashing it I think that will be quite something and if the chapel is ever restored then it will be illuminated by natural light these round holes in the ceiling were originally glass lights that permitted sunlight what kind of people are buried here well all sorts but to down the catacomb it's mainly middle-class this is quite an interesting one it's a gentleman who died in India his coffin was packed off and sent off to Kenzel greeting obviously knew that was a good place to be buried but unfortunately no money came with this nor any instruction so he realized probably for eternity here we have the mortuary table this is no more than two slabs set on edge this is the first port of call for most of the coffins that came down here lots of coffins actually came down in the catechu just on a temporary basis obviously people die suddenly nobody's thought about buying a plot or thought about putting a mausoleum up so here they may well rest with quite some time these two particular coffins now been here for quite some time so they're not moving anywhere tell me about these tombs are interesting yes they're very popular with the Victorians is immortal domes in sight you've got porcelain flowers all innately made and the greenery is actually stamped brass that wooden painted originally green now this is the really unique secret here isn't it yes we're very proud of our hydraulic catafalque this is the device which lowers the coffins from above down to the catacomb below originally this catafalque was actually worked by cogs and that was not seem to be a very good way as a noisy and it was very disruptive because it didn't always work so they got Bremen Robinson in in the 1840s to put it into hydraulics it actually works literally by water pressure it comes down under its own weight and then it's pumped up again literally pumped up by hand to the chapel above another amazing set of catacombs built in London were built not for people but for horses Camden catacombs basically were built by the railway company as a means of getting goods onto the railway network there were a number of massive goods depots in the Camden area and a lot of the goods were brought in by horse so they built a series of horse tunnels so that horses could actually bring the goods into the lower floors of the goods warehouse but there was also an underground Wharf the the goods depots were adjacent to the Regents canal so they built a short branch from the Regents canal into what is a sort of central marshaling area beneath the depots so we'd have the the horse tunnels the canal barges all concentrating on this one point of Camden beneath the goods depots and so it was a a major point of access to the railway network for goods traffic we found underground stables and we're you know dating back to the Victorian age here the straw was still on the floor it was amazing the horses had been in there we walked along the horse tunnel decrepid falling down but it was an amazing place secret underground locations have been used in every facet of life be it for fun war or even death but every city or town has an extensive underground network sprawling beneath it now although it must be there we never visit it or hardly ever see it it's the sewers these marvels of Victorian engineering be they in London Manchester or Liverpool carry away millions of gallons of sewage and rainwater every year well over a century since they were originally built but how do we learn to build such remarkable subterranean structures most people think that the Victorian engineering Seward story started in London with Joseph Basel jet but another engineering genius beat him to it here in Wapping whilst hundreds of commuters used this staircase every day what they may not realize is that this shaft was originally dug to get workers down to a level below the bottom of the River Thames to attempt a task that many and thought impossible once the shot was dug work began on the tunnel on the 2nd of March 1855 and continued for 15 years the Thames broke in more than once and many workers drowned or others died of fever but that tunnel was the first of many that would be dug under the Thames and today the Thames tunnel is still used as a key part of London's underground system the genius behind its construction was isambard kingdom brunel father mark while briefly in debtors prison he witnessed a small worm burrowing through rotten wood that worm Teredo novalis the common ship worm inspired him to come up with a burrowing device based on the worms shell like head it was a giant plate that the men could stand on allowing them to dig their tunnel and pass the spoil behind just as the worm did the project went on for so long that mark fell ill and his son Isambard took over and finally finished the project successfully the lessons learned from the project were keenly taken up by other engineers and allowed the Victorian sewers to be built nationwide including the one at Brighton we're about 15 feet underground at the moment we are now going down about 25 feet underground to the main storm water tunnel one of the outlets as you can see here this is a spring water running through the sewer system at the moment it's not Sur it at all but I've noticed it's round there but it's egg-shaped over there the reason why it's an egg-shaped bowel because the Victorians are very very clever the idea of making an egg shape belt literally with three feeds one because it's stronger than a round Bowl two because it can hold more capacity and the best thing that happened was that it's through all the water to the bottom of the V if they turn the egg shape upside down which would allow the sewer system to flow I'm surprised here we are one of the deepest parts and it really it isn't that smelly at all now Brighton sewers are not smelly because the Victorians put air vents a lot of air vents on the system right the way through the town now a lot of the air vents are hidden behind the hotels so no one knows that they're there we've only come across the air beds when we've found like block drains and we try to sources and through oh hey looks like you've got a leak it certainly does if you like to stick your finger in the hole rather than point yeah that little boy from Holland just to stop the damn it used to say now what this is this is just pure spring water and we normally leave them break through the brickwork otherwise it builds up pressure and it could blow the bricks out but they're quite safe and they're very harmless I got some lessons yeah what was it like actually building the post well I don't think you is actually an igt actually because they've actually built seating places like this so they can sit down and have their dinner like crisps which is coming in now up to the Steen overflows over which as you can see is a massive chamber I noticed there's no pumps here or the sound of pumps at least no because it's all gravity as I explained earlier when they built the x8 valves to make the sewer system float and this is why the sewer system worked so well other rats down here there are rat but because we've been walking around and making noise we've probably scared them away but there's not many residences but I do know that there are some living things down here up on the wall back i yet the tree roots up on the wall there okay well during 1987 when we had the big hurricane the trees come down from water they've literally broken through now the brickwork and come down into the sewer systems to feed on the water is it going to cause a problem to the stability of the post no no because we keep an eye on disability and if it needs any you know we don't do any damage where a couple routes away and reroute the joints I can hear water but I can't see it yes if you look in this direction on the left hand side you've got the London Road sewer on the right hand but the new and the tune waving eight-foot barrels and what happens in the sewer at the other side of that wall now if we have heavy rain it will come down the two sewer systems into this section and it'll only going to a 5-foot height here so the amount of water literally overflow this into here and then run down the tube our out to the stormwater guard this network seems to go on for about how large is it in Brighton we've got over 44 miles of sewer system then we can literally put a boat in the sewer system and go around and check all the brickwork and the stability of the sewer is that a job to get many volunteers for yes people are doing that actually because it's not like is it here with a few lights it's literally pitch black and Kaplan's which is float around it's like a tunnel of love we have witnessed Smuggler's caves catacombs and even whole subterranean cities in this tour of underground britain so next time you see a trapdoor or a manhole cover pay close attention there are many wonderful places and secrets to discover and you can find many of them if you look close enough the world right under your feet you you you

Channel: Ardee Video

Views: 1,106,336

Keywords: underground, subterranea, tunnels, britain, england, sewers, caves, catacombs, smuggling

Id: C0F8qWFL0_M

Length: 48min 20sec (2900 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 19 2013