It's been an absolute hot minute since this happened, but better late than never? 😬
Same idea as the other 7 Deep Level Shelters under London, a twin pair of 427m (ish) long tunnels built underneath existing tube stations from 1940-1942 by the Home Office to provide shelter capacity under the capital during World War 2.
Fast forward a few years, and in 1977 the shelter got used by the BBC as a backdrop for Doctor Who and his mates.
After that, document storage company Abbot Datastore at some point took on the lease of the facility and stacked it high with boxes of paperwork, tapes and who knows what else. It's somewhere after this that our visit comes in.
Monkey, Gabe, Extreme Ironing and myself met up at a local pub to discuss the plan of action. Trying to infiltrate a live set of tunnels like this was new to me, they'd previously all been disused and mostly uncared for, whereas this was supposedly a live secure storage facility. As a result I opted not to have a beer in the pub, instead thinking a focused mind would get my nerves through the experience. Big mistake.
Enter, electron ladder:
But we'll come back to that later.
For now, we were in, and we pressed ahead cautiously not entirely knowing what we were doing.
The spiral stairs seemingly take forever to get to the bottom of the 30ish metre shaft, scabby peeling tunnel ring segments accompanying you the entire way. Having previously been in Clapham North DLS I was expecting an in-use shelter to be a bit less derpy. We turned the corner, gently pushed through a door and were greeted with rows of soggy, moulding boxes. Now, I'm no expert on document storage, but I'm pretty sure this ain't it.
There was a lovely old Ministry of War sign at the entrance to the shelter level, though.
Pushing through another door into one of the main tunnel ways, and things got nicer, a lot less soggy but still pretty mouldy in places.
From here it was rows upon rows upon rows of former bunk beds, all piled high with all types of inane paperwork. We started perusing through a few of them but it was clear that whoever had sent these boxes off to storage was only doing it under legal obligation, there was nothing at all juicy.
Aside from the bunks there wasn't much else to suggest it's former usage, no sign of original fixings and annoyingly, we didn't learn that the shelters originally had mercury arc rectifiers until after the trip, so didn't end up seeing those.
But back then this was all fresh ground to us. I'd personally only seen Clapham North and Chancery Lane DLS previous to this, and as far as we were aware (at the time) no one had made it into Camden before.
Having had a fairly good poke around the tunnels we thought we'd likely outstayed our welcome and began the trudge back up the however-fucking-many steps it was up the shaft towards ground level.
And this is where things went awry slightly... Extreme Ironing was first back up the electron ladder to the ventilation conduit above, with me quickly learning on my ascent that there's definitely a way not to climb electrons. Tackling it head on like a solid ladder I ran into difficulty at the overhang, and with the ladder weighted on a rounded surface ran out of useful handholds, followed by strength. Before I knew it I was tumbling down towards the protruding pipework 4 metres below, bouncing off and gracefully landing on top of Gabe. I'm not sure if it's him or my kidneys to thank for not taking a full pelt hit to the floor, but a trip to A&E later and somehow I'd managed to miss my spine and not damage any organs. I'm pretty sure having those beers beforehand would have displaced my anxieties and led me up that ladder without issue. 😅
The next week was absolute agony, but was my motivation to learn SRT and be rid of electrons for good. (or so I thought)
Same idea as the other 7 Deep Level Shelters under London, a twin pair of 427m (ish) long tunnels built underneath existing tube stations from 1940-1942 by the Home Office to provide shelter capacity under the capital during World War 2.
Fast forward a few years, and in 1977 the shelter got used by the BBC as a backdrop for Doctor Who and his mates.
After that, document storage company Abbot Datastore at some point took on the lease of the facility and stacked it high with boxes of paperwork, tapes and who knows what else. It's somewhere after this that our visit comes in.
Monkey, Gabe, Extreme Ironing and myself met up at a local pub to discuss the plan of action. Trying to infiltrate a live set of tunnels like this was new to me, they'd previously all been disused and mostly uncared for, whereas this was supposedly a live secure storage facility. As a result I opted not to have a beer in the pub, instead thinking a focused mind would get my nerves through the experience. Big mistake.
Enter, electron ladder:
But we'll come back to that later.
For now, we were in, and we pressed ahead cautiously not entirely knowing what we were doing.
The spiral stairs seemingly take forever to get to the bottom of the 30ish metre shaft, scabby peeling tunnel ring segments accompanying you the entire way. Having previously been in Clapham North DLS I was expecting an in-use shelter to be a bit less derpy. We turned the corner, gently pushed through a door and were greeted with rows of soggy, moulding boxes. Now, I'm no expert on document storage, but I'm pretty sure this ain't it.
There was a lovely old Ministry of War sign at the entrance to the shelter level, though.
Pushing through another door into one of the main tunnel ways, and things got nicer, a lot less soggy but still pretty mouldy in places.
From here it was rows upon rows upon rows of former bunk beds, all piled high with all types of inane paperwork. We started perusing through a few of them but it was clear that whoever had sent these boxes off to storage was only doing it under legal obligation, there was nothing at all juicy.
Aside from the bunks there wasn't much else to suggest it's former usage, no sign of original fixings and annoyingly, we didn't learn that the shelters originally had mercury arc rectifiers until after the trip, so didn't end up seeing those.
But back then this was all fresh ground to us. I'd personally only seen Clapham North and Chancery Lane DLS previous to this, and as far as we were aware (at the time) no one had made it into Camden before.
Having had a fairly good poke around the tunnels we thought we'd likely outstayed our welcome and began the trudge back up the however-fucking-many steps it was up the shaft towards ground level.
And this is where things went awry slightly... Extreme Ironing was first back up the electron ladder to the ventilation conduit above, with me quickly learning on my ascent that there's definitely a way not to climb electrons. Tackling it head on like a solid ladder I ran into difficulty at the overhang, and with the ladder weighted on a rounded surface ran out of useful handholds, followed by strength. Before I knew it I was tumbling down towards the protruding pipework 4 metres below, bouncing off and gracefully landing on top of Gabe. I'm not sure if it's him or my kidneys to thank for not taking a full pelt hit to the floor, but a trip to A&E later and somehow I'd managed to miss my spine and not damage any organs. I'm pretty sure having those beers beforehand would have displaced my anxieties and led me up that ladder without issue. 😅
The next week was absolute agony, but was my motivation to learn SRT and be rid of electrons for good. (or so I thought)
