Liverpool’s secret underground city

Aug 1 2007 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

Everyone in the city looks up to see new buildings reaching for the sky, but beneath their feet is another Liverpool of cellars, streams, tunnels and secrets. David Charters reports

‘HEY, man, dig those crazy vibes,” whispered the cool cat in shades way back in the 1950s, as his slip-on shoes shuffled down the steps into a jive cellar throbbing with young life, where the musicians with unsunned faces were plucking strings and blowing horns.

And “dig” is the important word here. For, although Liverpudlians these days look with kindly eyes on the new buildings piercing the clouds over the waterfront, their instincts have always taken them underground.

This is the world of beer casks and coffins, spiders and weary prostitutes, lost streams and rats, black beetles and poets, pipes, railway commuters and Beatles, sewage outlets, smugglers and priests-on-the-run, silent wells, and cables carrying warmth into our homes.

But understanding the subterranean city of years gone-by is essential to the regeneration of today.

Young lovers kiss beneath the street lamp in the chilled night, all romantic with collars high and hopes soaring, not thinking that the arteries of that light run beneath them in the hidden land.

Since the dawn of our time, we have had to build – whether it has been sideways, up or down. But sideways uses too much of our precious land.

A cursory glance at our skylines today would suggest that up had been the obvious solution. However, this has been true only from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when technological developments enabled us to build skyscrapers to accommodate the demands of cities with rapidly swelling populations.

The problems of load-bearing and weight distribution required massive bases for tall buildings, leading to pyramidal shapes. In seeking a solution, architects were aided by Henry Bessemer (1813-1898), an Englishman, who had learned that pig-iron could be turned quickly and economically into steel by blowing hot air through it.

With this advance, George A Fuller (1851-1900) was able to erect the 13-storey, 165ft Tacoma building in Chicago in 1889. This was the world’s first building in which the outer walls did not support the weight. Instead, it was borne by steel frames within the building. With frames supporting the structure, you could go as high as you liked.

The 295ft Royal Liver Building on Liverpool’s Pier Head, finished in 1911, was the first in Britain constructed in this way.

Before that, the tendency was to go down. In the grander domestic dwellings, the servants were often put in the basement – Upstairs Downstairs style.

Quite modest terraced houses also had basements and these served as larders before the mass production of electrical refrigerators in the 1950s. In factories and commercial premises, as well as the great public buildings and churches, the basements or cellars would be used for storage or accommodation, while giving the structure additional anchorage.

Liverpool lies on durable sandstone, which provides a strong base and can also be dug comparatively easily. Our subterranean city is proportionately the biggest in Britain.

But the jazz and skiffle crazes of the 1950s gave the cellars a new vibrancy. Bewildered parents, more accustomed to gentle waltzes, told their sons and daughters that if they must play the devil’s music, they could do it “down below” which, apart from protecting sensitive ears upstairs, was closer to the hobs of Hell.

Of course, on a larger scale, cellars were opened to the public as clubs and music venues, most famously The Cavern, on Mathew Street.

Underground Liverpool was honeycombed with tunnels, culverts, basements and passages.

Most prominent of these were the railway tunnels joining Edge Hill with the docks at Wapping (1827) and Waterloo (1849). These were followed in 1880 by the railway tunnel under the Mersey linking Liverpool’s James Street station with Birkenhead Hamilton Square. Then came the road tunnels from Liverpool to Birkenhead (1934) and Wallasey (1971).

And we haven’t yet mentioned Liverpool’s most celebrated “mole”. In the early 19th century, Joseph Williamson (1769-1840), a tobacco merchant and philanthropist, ordered a labyrinth of tunnels to be dug in an area to the east of the Metropolitan (Catholic) Cathedral – quite why remains unknown. Was it simply to provide work and wages for local men? Could they have been designed as shelters for people escaping some future Armageddon? Such suggestions have been offered.

In 2002, the Joseph Williamson Society opened a heritage centre dedicated to the tunnels. Some are now open for guided tours.

There are holes under large parts of the city, which is in the midst of one of Britain’s most ambitious building programmes, as a prelude to next year’s European Capital of Culture.

But, as any upwardly mobile caveman, considering a new house for the wife and children on a river bank, would have told you – make sure the ground is firm.

Enter the civil and structural engineers, who have to be consulted before you can proceed with building projects.

In layman’s terms, you shouldn’t build on top of a hole.

Bingham Davis is a respected firm researching subterranean Liverpool to help with the city’s regeneration, including its own contract at Mann Island, to run concurrently with Liverpool Museum.

Sitting in their offices on Temple Street, a few yards from the site of the Old Iron Door Club made famous by Merseybeat groups, including The Searchers, are two of its directors Robert Seymour, 42, and Brian Edmonson, 62, both engineers. They are looking at a map, which features a stretch of the old tunnel at Liverpool Castle. “It will still be there, though it has been covered and now there is no access to it,” says Robert.

“The Cavern is an interesting one,” says Brian, a married man with two children. “When they were digging away they came across a shaft and they went down the shaft and found a huge cavern. It was man-made and full of water. I think it was the head of a well. There was a tunnel on either end of it. You could get a boat down there. The architect wanted to use it as a water feature, but it was a bit expensive. They bridged the building over, so as to protect the cavern, so it is still under there, still full of water. It was probably a well. There were lots of wells in Liverpool because of all the brewers. Some go down a couple of hundred feet.”

Brian then makes the point that, in the New World, towns were built around the railway stations. In Europe, the towns came first, so the trains went under them, though in Liverpool we had an overhead railway from 1893 until its demolition in 1956.

“To engineers today, and it wouldn’t have been any different 150 years ago, you have to sit your foundations on solid ground. If you have to dig down to get to that ground, you have already dug the hole,” says Robert, also a married father of two.

He calculates that an average 14-floor building would weigh 40,000 tons.

Bingham Davis is doing the engineering design on the £80m mixed development Neptune/ Countryside Properties on Mann Island. It includes two 12-storey blocks, one 14-storey block and the underground car park. Work starts in September and they are using their experience and expertise in dealing with the road tunnel beneath.

Down the road from their office, a gaggle of tourists is reading the plaque dedicated to the beat and jazz musicians who appeared at the Iron Door. Then they ask directions to The Cavern.

The sun smiles briefly through a gap in the clouds. In this city of hopes and dreams, you don’t have to look into the sky for stars. A little Japanese women photographs her husband leaning on the statue of John Lennon, who doesn’t feel the rain fall on his head, any more.

And the water runs down the gutters into our secret city.

davidcharters@dailypost.co.uk

Tunnelling through the ages

ONE of the first tunnels in Liverpool was thought to have been dug about 700 years ago – running from the site of the old castle, on what is now Derby Square, down James Street to The Strand. Some reports claim that it was 8ft high in places and could have served as an escape route or a clandestine entrance.

One of the most familiar tunnels to curious Liverpudlians is at the bottom of a steep walkway from the Anglican Cathedral to St James Garden cemetery. It is 65ft long and about 12ft high.

The Queensway (Birkenhead – Liverpool) tunnel remains one of the world’s greatest engineering feats. It runs for 2.13 miles and has a diameter of 46ft 3ins, Some 1,700 men dug it with pick-axes, shovels and spades. Seventeen died. It took nine years to finish.

Perhaps the most famous cellar in Liverpool houses the Western Approaches Combined Operations HQ, in Derby House, Exchange Flags, from which we conducted the Battle of the Atlantic.

It was established in Liverpool in 1941.

The bunker has a 7ft concrete roof and 3ft walls enclosing more than 100 rooms on two floors. It is open to the public.