Set on the fringes of the City, Furnival Street, a shortcut for London’s lawyers, is nothing to write home about.
Yet the unremarkable frontage of No 39, with its nondescript black door, is the portal to a whole subterranean world. A lift takes you deep down into a mile-long series of tunnels, dug during the Blitz, which have harboured spies and national secrets. Their next mission: to become one of London’s leading tourist attractions.
That is the dream of Angus Murray, an Australian banker heading up the company which is spending £220 million on the tunnels to make them a leading tourist site. Murray is not looking simply to compete with Churchill’s War Rooms. He wants this unheard-of place to be a rival for the London Eye.
“No other tunnel experience has the same scale and combined rich history,” he said, pointing out that the tunnels are not exactly in the sticks but “ideally located in central London, a 13-minute walk from Covent Garden and between the British Museum and Tate Modern”.
Although they are so close to the centre of the capital, the tunnels are still unknown. However, now they are no longer subject to the Official Secrets Act, their mysteries can be revealed.
They were originally built for a straightforward purpose, one they didn’t end up serving. As the Luftwaffe pummelled London in the early 1940s, the authorities felt there was a need to build more bomb shelters to ease the pressure on tube stations. Work started in 1941 but by the time the tunnels were ready two years later, the worst of the bombing was over.
Instead, some unexpected tenants arrived: the Inter-Services Research Bureau, one of those civil service names which is too boring not to be interesting. It was, in fact, a branch of the Special Operations Executive — the underground army of saboteurs and subversives whom Churchill had ordered to “set Europe ablaze”. The spies had moved in.
The marketing on the company’s London Tunnels website heavily channels James Bond — once you are on the site, your mouse tracker turns into a little gun barrel like the one which opens the films in the spy series. There is good cause for this comparison. The bureau consisted of gizmo and gadget makers. They were the inspiration for Q-branch from the Bond stories.
However, espionage was just part of the tunnels’ tale, as the spies only stayed there until the end of the war. After they moved out, this subterranean world became one of London’s safest places. From 1945 to 1949, the Public Record Office moved some 400 tonnes of sensitive documentation down there for safekeeping.
After that, it was taken over by the General Post Office, later BT. As the Kingsway telephone exchange, the tunnels became a key junction in Britain and the world’s telephone network. The first trans-Atlantic cable terminated there, and it housed the hotline which ran between the White House and the Kremlin during the Cold War.
Bond may have been long gone by this point but martinis remained. There was a fully stocked watering hole in the tunnels until at least the 1980s; the “deepest licensed bar” in London which had snooker tables and fake windows. By then, however, the march of progress was moving steadily but inexorably onwards and the tunnels’ equipment was becoming obsolete. They were put up for sale in 2008.
Sixteen years on, an enormous wave of investment is breaking, which itself took three years to negotiate. To make it worthwhile, this overlooked door on a back street in London EC4 is going to have to attract legions of visitors. It can accommodate two million people annually, some 10,000 of those being schoolchildren who will get in for free.
It seems like a tall order, but Murray, who hopes to open in 2027, is unafraid. “In the same location, visitors will be able to explore the inspiration for Q-Branch from James Bond and an actual deep-level shelter to protect the British against German bombing,” he said. His question is not why will people come here, but why wouldn’t they?
