London's secret wartime tunnels will host spy museum, underground bar

National Post

a day ago

LONDON — There is a history-rich part of London that few people have seen, where the city braced for the Blitz, James Bond's creator got inspiration and secret Cold War messages passed between Washington and Moscow.
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It's a network of tunnels 100 feet (30 metres) below the streets that was secret for decades — but could be the city's next big tourist destination. Local authorities have approved plans to fill the 90,000 square-foot (8,400 square-metre) site with an intelligence museum, an interactive Second World War memorial and one of the world's deepest underground bars.
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'It's an amazing space, an amazing city,' said Angus Murray, chief executive of The London Tunnels, as subway trains rattled overhead. 'And I think it tells a wonderful story.'
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The tunnels lie directly below London Underground's Central Line in the city's Holborn area. Work to dig them began in secret in 1940, when Britain feared invasion by Nazi Germany. They were designed to shelter up to 8,000 people in a pair of parallel tunnels 16 1/2 feet (5 metres) wide and 1,300 feet (400 metres) long.
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The tunnels were never used for that purpose; by the time they were finished in 1942 the worst of the Blitz was over, and Underground bosses had opened up subway stations as air raid shelters for Londoners.
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Instead, the tunnels became a government communications centre and a base for the Special Operations Executive, a clandestine unit that sent agents — many of them women — on perilous sabotage missions in Nazi-occupied territory under orders from Prime Minister Winston Churchill to 'set Europe ablaze.'
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A naval officer named Ian Fleming was a liaison officer to the SOE, and the subterranean HQ may have provided inspiration for the world of secret agent 007 that he went on to create.
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'This truly is the Q Branch of James Bond,' said Murray, referring to the thrillers' fictional MI6 quartermaster and gadget-maker.
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After the war, more tunnels were added to the complex and the site became a secure telephone exchange. From the mid-1950s it was a terminus of the first trans-Atlantic undersea telephone cable. After the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in 1962, a 'red telephone' hotline between the Pentagon and the Kremlin was established and ran through here.
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Up to 200 people worked underground, bound to secrecy but with the compensation of an onsite canteen and bar. For a time, the site also housed a bunker to be used by the government in the event of nuclear war.
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By the 1980s, technology had moved on and British Telecom moved out. The tunnels lay largely forgotten until BT sold them in 2023 to Murray's private equity-backed group.