Just throwing in my 2 cents worth to what appears to be a dead or dying thread. I lived at East Goscote from 1964 to around 1972, I believe our family were the 5th or 6th family to move into the new development, we lived 36 Ploughmans Lea. At the time demolition of the munitions factories was in full swing, sand was being extracted from pits towards the railway and Jelsons were pushing full steam ahead with the new housing construction. For a child of 7 it was paradise. I clearly remember the two huge bunkers (now referred to as 'mounds' but we called them the Bat Caves), they were full of bats (duh) and had a rail platform (or loading platform) inside them, the roof was supported by concrete pillars (maybe 20 or 30 of them?) and there were ventilations shafts around the edges which we could climb by push feet against one wall and back against the other. We used to go in there and light huge fires which would smoke the place out. Both of these bunkers were open at the time, we played in both of them. All over the East Goscote site were concrete buildings separated by earth mounds, we understood these were to contain the blast in case one of the munitions building blew up. These buildings were demolished over a period of time, and the mounds dug away, but we explored pretty well all of them finding all sorts of things, old tools, benches, old desks with stuff in. Over towards Broome Lane we found a fenced off area and some buildings which seemed to be related to aircraft, inside one of them we found some glass vials, about the size of an egg, which contained acid, they'd fizz and burn stuff when we threw them, great hand grenades for children... one of the buildings contained the fuselage of a small airplane. Towards the railway, about opposite The Warren, there were some undergound buildings which ran along side the tracks and very close to them, nothing very big, maybe the size of the average living room, they were long and narrow and had stairs at either end. From memory there were two or three of these. I do remember another underground tank, this was around 100m outside the entrance to the Bat Caves (the mound), it seemed to have been an old fuel tank as it was oval shaped and sat on a tilt, the far end was full water and newts. My guess is it was around 6m long, 3m wide and tall enough for child to stand up In, the entrance was just a hole in the ground, almost like the tank has rusted through in one area and the ground above it fell in creating an entrance. The sand pits were pretty big and would flood with water, we'd build polythene boats using stuff 'borrowed' the building site. One pit had an island, it must have been one particularly strong concrete building which for some reason couldn't be demolished so was dug around creating an island when the floods came, it disappeared eventually but I can't remember how or when. So far as a tunnel network is concerned I have no recollection of this, we saw no evidence of any entrances and none of the other children we played with over the years mentioned this. We were pretty adventurous and got into pretty well everything so I think we'd have come across or heard about them if there was anything. While I'd like to thing that a tunnel network does exist there is nothing I can remember to back this up. And a belated 'thank you' to the many builders whose lemonade bottles we liberated for the sixpence refund on the bottle, and apologies for flattening out the piles of building sand and filling them with water to skate on when they froze.
