If you’re reading this, then you probably have eyes, and if you have eyes then you’ve probably already seen the cinematically jaw-dropping images peppered throughout this article and thought to yourself ‘whatever that it, it looks like it’s going to be brain-meltingly cool when it opens’.
The good news? Yes, it looks like it will indeed treat all our collective cognitive faculties in the same manner as a flamethrower treats a marshmallow. The bad news? It’s opening in 2028.
These are The London Tunnels, so-called because (and we’re taking a real stab-in-the-dark-guess here) because they’re a series of tunnels underneath London. They’re a mile long, tall enough to drive a double decker bus down, and buried 30 meters below the surface of Holborn.
They were originally built in WW2 as deep-level air raid shelters to survive the Blitz, before being taken over by the nascent MI6 after the war (apparently inspiring Ian Fleming to invent Q Branch), and then became a series of super-boring telephone exchanges before finally being abandoned in the ’80s.
Well, no space that cool is going to go unexploited for long.
Now the tunnels are having £120 million poured into them by the same folks who zhuzhed up Batterse Power Station, and their plan is to turn them into a kind of cool immersive museum space, as well as a cocktail bar.
Given that they’ve been derelict for decades (and thus have likely has a thriving ecosystem of damp, rust, and unkillable cockroach overlords) the process of making them safe for habitation is taking a little more complicated than just flipping the lights on and setting out some bar-stools. So, we’ll hopefully be able to do some safe, legal, and mind-blowing urban spelunking in 2028.
Just a few years down the pipeline.
NOTE: The London Tunnels is set top open in early 2028. In the meantime, you can take a look at their strangely bland website.
The London Tunnels | 40 Furnival St, EC1N 2LE
Like tunnels? Take a peek at the London Postal Museum…
