Okay, let's talk about secret tunnels
Plus Wombles, larks and Peckham's finest
There comes a time in the life of every London-based publication where you have to write about secret tunnels. It’s just inevitable.
We were hoping to go at least a few more months before we had to put on our high vis jackets and descend into the depths, but circumstances have conspired against us and here we are. Although, to be totally honest, writing about secret tunnels is a bit of a welcome break from some of the more upsetting topics we’ve written about in recent weeks (and we’re not just talking about Salt Bae).
Tunnels at Buckingham Pallets
The first bit of tunnel-related news is that the six environmental protesters who managed to dig 100ft of tunnels in Euston at the start of this year, just walked out of court with all the charges against them dismissed.
The group created the network of tunnels under Euston Square Gardens to object against the building of a temporary taxi rank and high rise offices as part of HS2. They concealed their construction work with wooden pallets (hence the nickname ‘Buckingham Pallets’) and then filled them with “enough food and water supplies” to see them through a month of subterranean protest.
The group had been charged with “aggravated trespass,” which is a tricky one to make stick (as you’ll know if you’ve read Nick Hayes’ excellent The Book of Trespass), because as well as trespassing you also have to be deemed to have been “intentionally obstructing, disrupting, or intimidating others from carrying out ‘lawful activities’”.
It looks like it was that second part that tripped up HS2, as the judge decided that the company was “not carrying out any construction work on the site at the time the charges were levelled against the protesters.” Or, in other words, if you try and claim that the ‘lawful activity’ the protestors prevented you from carrying out was ‘removing protestors who were stopping you from carrying out lawful activity’ then the only thing you’re going to achieve is giving everyone a bit of a headache (even if the disruption cost you something in the region of £3.5m).
Incidentally, this is just the latest chapter in a whole strew of tunnel-related hoo-ha at Euston. This time last year a Court of Appeal judge upheld a High Court ruling, which said the design of the tunnels leading to Euston were safe and there was definitely “no present risk of catastrophic collapse”. How comforting.
After Priti Patel’s speech last week, in which she announced a new criminal offence for “interfering with critical national infrastructures such as roads, railways and newspaper printing presses,” this might be the last time we see a group of environmental activists triumphantly exiting a court room. Although, ironically, another group of tunnel-dwelling eco warriors has just been recruited by the government to help push the message around COP26 later this month (#sellouts):
Tunnels at St James’ Palace
And now on to the more tunnely of this week’s secret tunnel news: the ‘revelation’ that there’s a passage running from St James’ Palace to the bar at the Dukes Hotel1 (above) just over the way on St James’ Place.
Unfortunately, this exciting bit of subterranean tittle tattle comes to us by way of the Daily Mail’s ‘Diary Editor’ Richard Eden, who got it straight from the mouth of Jack Brooksbank, tequila brand ambassador and husband to Princess Eugenie (his half-third cousin twice-removed):
Given that this information comes from the same guy who, in the same breath, admits he used to claim tequila didn’t give you a hangover; we’re loathe to give the story any real credibility. However…
There have been rumours of a ‘booze burrow’ at St James’ for years, but as far as we know, this is the first time Dukes has been mentioned as the destination. Normally the tunnel is said to come out at Berry Brothers and Rudd, the wine merchant on St James's Street, just on the other side of Pall Mall.
That building (and its vast basement) has been there for a long time2 and there’s long been talk of a Stuart-era tunnel which would allow Charles II to nip across the way to visit one of the brothels that used to frequent the area.
Over on the Berry Bros. blog there’s an interview with the cellar manager who mentions “talk of [a tunnel] that ran under Pall Mall to St James’s Palace”, and if you ask nicely and go into the shop’s cellars you can see a bricked up archway for yourself.
As you can see from our highly technical map, a 400 year old tunnel of less than 100 yards leading to a brothel makes way more sense than one which would have to be over three times that long, would need to go under two roads and come out at a spot that has only been a hotel since 1908 (although the idea of a tunnel connecting the the headquarters of The Grand Lodge of Mark Master Masons and St James’s Palace isn’t outside the realms of possibility).
In the end, we guess it comes down to whether you want to believe the word of a guy who used to be a barman at Mahiki and married his (half-third, twice-removed) cousin.
If you want some more reputable tunnel nerdery then you could do worse than follow Guy Shrubsole whose work neatly brings together the worlds of environmentalism, trespassing and hidden tunnels. A few years ago he found (real, not made up) evidence of a network of Cold War-era tunnels underneath central London including an “atom bomb proof telephone exchange beneath High Holborn”.
And, as always, Ian Visits has some good stuff in the archives, including this 2009 post which has some juicy details about the Whitehall tunnel lifted from the pages of The Post Office Electrical Engineers Journal.
And the rest…
On yesterday’s Today programme on Radio 4, Mishal Husain interviewed a woman who went to the Met to report a violent mugging and was then asked out to dinner and harassed by the investigative officer on the case (go here and jump to 1:33:14 to hear that). Later on in the programme Husain also interviewed the deputy assistant commissioner of the Met, Bas Javid who attempted to defend the fact that that officer is still working, as well as the “tone deaf” advice that was produced by the Met recently (go to 2:33:58 to hear Mishal become increasingly withering and frustrated).
Part of that interview also addresses the story of Patsy Stevenson, the 28-year-old student who was arrested at the Sarah Everard vigil and then received 50 ‘likes’ from police officers on her Tinder profile. Glamour magazine spoke to Patsy about her experiences and what needs to be done to reform the Met.
Meanwhile, the UK’s “leading think tank” Policy Exchange has analysed a decade of knife crime data and discovered that “one in three London homicides in 2018 was linked to drill music”. More specifically, “the victim or perpetrator was an aspiring drill rapper, or drill music videos were used as evidence in the trial.”
A recent poll of UK voters asked “to what extent they thought that the police in general have a problem with antisemitism”. Across the country, 46% of respondents said they thought there was a problem with antisemitism, but in London that number shot up to 56%.
Earlier this week Transport for London unveiled its plans for a memorial to transport workers who have died from Covid-19. A commemorative plaque will be installed in a pedestrian plaza at Aldgate, alongside a cherry blossom tree. A planning application for the memorial will be submitted to Tower Hamlets council early next year with a view to opening the memorial by next summer. A reminder that there are still some outstanding questions around the implementation of safety precautions for bus drivers at the start of the pandemic.
The Times (paywall alert) reports that South Western Railway, may be adjusting its long-term timetable based on “three-day commuters” i.e. those people who go into the office (or “show their faces” as The Times puts it) on just Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.
Time Out has the details of new ITV2 show Peckham’s Finest which ITV is pitching as the SE15 equivalent of Made in Chelsea. The programme, which starts next Wednesday, will follow the lives of “an aspirational group of young people” and will “reflect life in Peckham in a way that our viewers can engage with and relate to.”
Finally for today, the Evening Standard have launched a new feature! It’s called ‘London Larks’ (because that’s a word everyone uses all the time) and it promises “a weekly dose of capital humour” but it’s actually a dumping ground for all those stories you’ve already seen on social media, most of which have nothing at all to do with London.
Trivia nugget no. 1: Ian Fleming was a regular at Dukes bar and “legend has it” that it was where Fleming coined the phrase “shaken, not stirred”. So there’s a chance all this could be a very convoluted marketing campaign for No Time To Die.
Trivia nugget no. 2: Berry Bros. was the twelfth oldest family businesses in Britain when this list was compiled back in 2015. Although, given that the Whitechapel Bell Foundry is no more, it might have scraped into the top 10 by now.