London’s Cold war era secret tunnels to open to public soon

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.

It’s a network of tunnels 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 8,400 square-metre site with an intelligence museum, an interactive World War II memorial and one of the world’s deepest underground bars.

“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.”

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 5 metres wide and 400 metres long.

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.

Instead, the tunnels became a government communications center 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.”

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.

“This truly is the Q Branch of James Bond,” said Murray, referring to the thrillers’ fictional MI6 quartermaster and gadget-maker.

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.

Up to 200 people worked underground, bound to secrecy but with the compensation of an onsite canteen and bar.

Associated Press