One room even features a secret entrance — hidden inside a rocket by the pool. — Ey — pshhh! :-)
I used to live in the inner city of Leipzig during my university days, and we had a door in the basement that led to wartime tunnels connecting it to other houses. It wasn't like a massive maze, just a hub with three other paths, each leading to another house nearby. From there, however, if they'd unlocked their doors, you could travel farther.
I was on a mission back then to befriend and convince random neighbours across the street to open their access doors and get some kind of network going, but I didn't meet with much enthusiasm.
I actually lived there for a few years, I guess I'd forgotten that the millenium bid fell through :)
Edit: By the by I do intend to visit again at some point if only to see the DEC exhibition at the town museum (if that's still on) and perhaps swing by Sweeney's pie shop (if that's still open).
Oh, and now I see from a sibling comment that there was another bid in 2022! It gives me a twinge of national pride that British rules on City-hood are so weird!
"In the end, the 2022 contest saw Reading beaten to the post by Dunfermline, Bangor, Douglas, Doncaster, Wrexham, Colchester, and nearby Milton Keynes. "
A lot of sources seem to cite Reading as 'England's largest town' but maybe that is by area, rather than population? Also depends on where you put the boundary.
That's where the problem lies. I spend too much of my life screaming into the void about UK addresses and what is and isn't a town :)
It's just about possible to create dataset of towns, cities, villages from mixing and matching and cutting up other geographies from the ONS (e.g. their Parished and Unparished data (though Unparished is its own nightmare), then the ONS Built-Up Areas dataset but... that one cuts out all the non-built parts so Milton Keynes is bunch of big blobs around the residential areas).
But if you frankenstein it, you lose all of the formal connections that define other links, and if you try to cheat via geospatial join, you will link police forces to areas they don't actually serve.
For Swindon, you're kinda stuck glueing together (going from memory here - please correct me if I'm off) the Parishes of Central Swindon, South Swindon and West Swindon. But these will overlap with some villages so it's not a true count.
And that's a natural moment to lead on to the next critical point: how're we measuring population? (I always get that Father Ted speech scene in my head thinking about this, start speaking - then twelve hours later "And now, we move on to liars")
Agreed, and it's a reasonable first reach for residential counts.
Problem is, it was last taken during 2021 - at the height of covid - and their estimates have been paying the price of it even since. Anything that touches on workday or employment they actively warn you away from, nowadays.
But then there's the elephant in the room: what if you're looking at somewhere like the City of London (the square mile one) where residential population is somewhere between 8,500 and 9,000 people?
EDIT: it slipped by me!
There is no single UK-wide census. NRS do Scotland's, last in 2022. NISRA handle Northern Ireland's census, last in 2021. And the ONS for England and Wales, last in 2021.
Well, "largest town" changes all the time anyway. Milton Keynes is "larger" than both by more than one metric, but it became a city in 2022.
The whole city status thing is a bit silly. It should definitely be based on more than population, but Milton Keynes getting it firmly established population is all it takes now.
The city is on a hill - or more precisely, on a ridge flanked by a river canyon on one side and a valley carved by a smaller stream on the other.
Due to that, the Znojmo catacombs are always above the water table & there was never really issues with drainage. There are a couple natural springs and overflowing wells in the catacombs & they are drained by the so-called Jesuit aqueduct, that collects all the water and drains it into the moat of the city fortification system. Nowadays that part is also underground & it just flows in the the Dyje river.
So during an emergency, the could get rid of the sewage with the aqueduct outflow & store solid was in some sections not in use I guess.
Leipzig is a bit more progressive/alternative, so I can see such a initiative to work out in the right place, but I doubt that today this is still a big thing? Lots of construction and modernisation going on in the city.
I love that you basically tried to start a neighborhood underground transit network and the only thing standing in your way was getting the neighbors to cooperate.
Quite easily, even retrospectively. It has no impact on his neighbours, doesn't create an eyesore, etc. He had the planning folks round, had them speak to his architect. It's all legit and done the correct way.
It's not creepy, plenty of MoD buildings look like that.
Admittedly you don't expect to see one in a random suburb.
There's a story, not sure how true it is, of a contractor being brought in to renovate a recently-vacated government office building of something like 7 storeys. They came back and said "OK, we've looked at the 7 storeys above ground, what about the three below ground?" / "What 3 storeys below ground? There aren't any below ground".
No, but it's the kind of narrative that will help bring an above market price by casting its uniqueness as a feature, rather than the default of being a liability for differing from a plain beige box </realtalk>.
Homes need more whimsey. I recently discovered one of my interior doorways is actually a stone archway that someone had squared off, drywalled and installed a cheap hollow door for no apparent reason. Working with a stonemason to re-point/parge it and bring it back to glory. Will I ever see a return on this investment? Probably not but fuck it it'll make my house just that much cooler.
> I recently discovered one of my interior doorways is actually a stone archway that someone had squared off, drywalled and installed a cheap hollow door for no apparent reason.
£50 to a spat out smartie says that was done in the 1960's, when the fashion was for everything to look smooth and modern.
We had a home with marvelous 1830's wooden panneling that was hidden behind thin sheets of plywood (presumably in the 1960's) that had been nailed over it to provide a smooth look.
Look up Barry Bucknell, a.k.a. Bodger Bucknell, he's responsible for a lot of this stuff. He was a nice guy and meant well, but he also caused an awful lot of damage.
Nobody can afford whimsey anymore because if you are doing anything invasive enough to involve permits then any sort of deviation from the "megacorp cookie cutter" aesthetic becomes a scrutinized liability.
While I get that, it's not like there's not a number of safety concerns with an underground tunnel. Flooding and collapse come to mind as some of the biggest potential problems.
Unfortunately, whimsy and safety are often in conflict with one another.
To you it will. To the next buyer it's a liability. In a world where paying off a mortgage was a possibility, this was fine. Now you're beholden to the median desires of the real estate market with every decision you make on your house.
Indeed it depends where you're at on the ladder. First time home buyer hoping to move up lands squarely in A if you have any sense at all. The goal of course being B when you're in deep equity after decades.
However your comment is confusing because you are replying to a sentence about ⓑ, but you're talking about ⓐ.
A big house is sold to people as an investment in future value (ⓐ).
More importantly a big house is often driven by a not-so-hidden desire to show off to others a massive status symbol (a tragic McMansion), and high status is also ⓐ.
Of course a big house can be ⓑ: but it is less common to see crazy money spent on large whims (assuming having enough wealth to be able to burn pointless dollars).
Sorry if I'm mansplaining - but I just don't understand why you'd say something so obvious, while implying something so disconnected.
A ⓑ house can have a high valuation. The thesis of the dichotomy is about intent, not about outcomes. And we often have mixed intents so it isn't as black&white as I stated it.
How is the stone wall that's been holding up my house for over 100 years a liability? You know it's still there even when it's covered with drywall right?
For Cray, the excavation project is more than a simple diversion. "I work when I'm at home," he recently told a visiting scientist. "I work for three hours, and then I get stumped, and I'm not making progress. So I quit, and I go and work in the tunnel. It takes me an hour or so to dig four inches and put in the 4-by-4s. Now, as you can see, I'm up in the Wisconsin woods, and there are elves in the woods. So when they see me leave, they come into my office and solve all the problems I'm having. Then I go back up and work some more."
> In psychology, incubation refers to the unconscious processing of problems, when they are set aside for a period of time, that may lead to insights. It was originally proposed by Graham Wallas in 1926 as one of his four stages of the creative process: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification.
> ...
> The experience of leaving a problem for a period of time and then finding that the difficulty evaporates on returning to the problem, or, even more striking, that the solution "comes out of the blue" when thinking about something else, is widespread. Many guides to effective thinking and problem solving advise the reader to set problems aside for a time.
Yeah, I though it was 15 meters of length, not that impressive... but it is 15m underground and '... 1,300 square feet of underground space, including tunnels and storage rooms'.
I'm waiting for his house to come up on auction in ~50 years or so when he eventually kicks the can. Will certainly be interesting to see how that auction goes, with the entire process being documented so well.
A small letter `m` would be for milli, aka 10^-3, if it is suffixed by a unit. A `m` alone is the SI unit for length. A capital `M` is the prefix for Mega, aka 10^6.
Please use the normalized units. The starting price for this auction is 300 k£ or about 400 kUS$.
Anyone interested in this might also be interested in Kala on TikTok. She's been building a tunnel system under her house and documenting it for a couple of years.
I've been following her since the beginning. I'm really skeptical 4 years later whether or not it's real at this point because it feels like it's pretty dangerous and expensive and I find it hard to believe she got the permitting necessary to keep digging below the house like that. But I still follow her.
The weird part is her onlyfans-style alternate account which is kind of strange...
Makeup and fingernails with pickaxes and minecarts. Yeah I totally believe it... Even those experimental archaeology influencers with an excavator working between the cuts were more genuine than that.
It would be pretty easy and also pretty unconvincing for anyone who did any manual labor in their life, let alone as backbreaking as mining with a pickaxe.
What is it with Brits and digging tunnelsystems underneath their houses? William Lyttle ("The Mole Man of Hackney"), "I'm just a man who loves to dig".
My grandfather had a kind of similar situation in Genk, Belgium where he bought a house and discovered a whole basement system that spanned a good part of the neighborhood.
In my teens I had enjoyed a book series "Tunnels" by Roderick Gordon & Brian Williams. The story cranks the mole fantasy up to 12 & surprise, surprise... it is set in some london downtown.
Especially as it has planning permission for two dwellings - a 5 bed house where the pool currently is, and a three bed house where the workshop is located.
Check the pictures, this doesn't look like a house to me. 2 levels of workshop areas and an office area.
Also the swimming pool is in the front yard, thats a weird one.
As far as I can tell, the actual house is missing. This is the outbuildings and tunnels and associated non-dwelling rooms only, and planning permission exists to build a house on this land. I suspect you won't get planning permission to use what is there as a house, but instead are required to replace this with a house according to the approved plans.
Perhaps they split the previous house out into its own plot and sold it separately.
It looks quite clear that they have split/subdivided their plot. In Australia this would be called a battle-axe property. The listing talks about "land associated with 123 Street Address".
They are basically selling off the far back garden of the main house. A long thin access road, the pool, the glasshouse/conservatory, the workshop, the tunnels, and the planning permission.
UK money. Still that works out to about $400k in us dollars. You can find better deals in the US, but probably none with tunnels - and unlikely to be places you want to live though not bad places (bad places in the US that would be around $120k)
> You can find better deals in the US, but probably none with tunnels
I once came across a middle-of-nowhere midwestern house auction listing by the US government. It came with a detached 5-vehicle garage, and an attached multistory underground hole I assumed was a missile silo. I can't remember the exact starting price, but it was significantly lower than $400k IIRC.
I think you can find a freestanding house in former DDR for less than 300k but it will certainly not come with a pool! Maybe a mud puddle if you are lucky.
How this works in the UK normally is when you're knee deep in the purchase process you have to get legal searches and a survey and the lawyers or surveyor will find the tunnels have no permissions and then you will not be able to borrow money to buy the property because no bank will lend when there is an adverse survey or there are legal questions associated.
You can get these types of things sorted (eg apply for retroactive planning permission) and the council will send a surveyor and give you an opinion but you are running the risk that they insist you either make it good (remedy anything they don't think was done right) or (worst case scenario) tell you to put it back like it was before the unpermitted work was done. This happens more often than people think.
That's why the house has been reduced in price so much - to find someone who feels like the headache is worth it. I have my doubts to be honest.
Planning permission isn't required if what is there has been established for over ten years without objection. I suspect that's the case here.
However, I think you're right that no bank will lend. They expect only a cash buyer who can "regularise" it and sell it on at considerable expense. Hence the price.
Apparently they have planning permission approved already to build houses on this land.
And if they were permitted you'd still have the liability. It's not like the permitting authority is gonna say "aw well we let you do it this is on us" if something happens.
"Real" liability of the "if something happens I'm on the hook" kind is not what's driving down the value here. What's driving down the value is that now that there's a bunch of pictures floating around the internet the tunnels are worthless because some government inspector could choose on a whim to force you to fill them in at your expense (which you would presumably fight, expensively, in court).
Germany uses freistehendes Haus, hence my use of "freestanding house".
Detached sounds funny, as if the house was previously attached to another but not anymore. Like how you can only be divorced or widowed after being married to someone.
For a number of years I lived near "Mole House" in Hackney, London. The tunnels the guy dug there were ultimately illegal (no consent) and filled in. I wonder what the story for this house is, how he obtained permission to do this.
I wonder how much water ingress is an issue and what measures have been taken to prevent the tunnels filling with water? Perhaps something about the geology prevents it from happening, but I’d normally expected some sort of sump pump evening for a lot of cellars.
well I (the submitter) messed up and wrote 15M in the submission title (note the cap) in error just to add to the confusion (now fixed, soz.) … I thought “best” just to repeat the article title
No worries, I take issue with the person who concocted the original title. I got here after the capital-M change and it was still confusing that they didn't mention the space that was dug out at this depth, instead paint a picture of a system of tunnels under a normal house(?)
sorry for the capital M … I have fixed in the title to 15m as in metres
that’s ~ 45 ft underground, I believe … perhaps not that impressive, but quite funny since I would hesitate to undermine my own house and surely this makes it worth less
It’s always fun finding these.
You have asbestos awareness, unknown utilities, and yeah some random person has just been digging tunnels…
Where does that go in the risk assessment?
Reminds me how rich people in historic areas of London took on the habit of extending their properties downwards, keeping the above-ground parts intact due to conservation laws.
That's because London is on clay. The Reading guy was mostly on chalk (and was himself an engineer). It sounds like the water table was a long way down as well. Soft clay or waterlogged sand are more like digging a hole in a bowl of custard. There are a lot of things that can go wrong - in the case of clay, even if you don't collapse the hole the clay can expand for years afterwards ("heave").
The map shows Reading does have some radon. Probably not at such a level most people do anything about it, but for a basement you'd definitely be better safe than sorry.
Hm i dont know ,if they were MY tunnels i would be ok with them there.Someone elses tunnels just rub me the wrong way , like stepping in someone elses house with the furniture still there.
It is kinda nice to be copying based because it's highly reliable (against paywalls, blocking, IP bans, .onion services and other domain name thingies). It would be cool if there was some sort of reputation system. Obviously on top of the promise above.
Archive.today is great, except for the Google captcha. It's no small feat to run an archiving service especially against copyright law–the archive.today guy seems a bit crazy–I still have mad respect for him.
Something that the people who keep submitting these links get wrong, is on Hacker News you're supposed to submit the original link and then the archive / bypass in the comments. Hacker News is not against against Nongraph or something, most archive.today mirrors are also banned for post submissions.
Says it’s vacant. Says guy started in the 80s. Going to deduce he is/was older and moving on for any number of normal reasons. Why is the reason so important?
128sqm below ground level is merely similar to a relatively small apartment: not a lot of area. I think you could get more genuinely usable area from renovating a garage in many cases. That's partly because it's more likely to have fresh air, light, and both level and long item (eg. furniture) access. Not to mention ceiling height and structural stability.
Apologies. I am from Australia we have the largest houses in the world, or used to. Even bigger than the yankees, historically. These days you'd be lucky!
Some people really love tunnels. Personally I always wanted a house with two basements. Or maybe more. Probably inspired by the 2002 movie Resident Evil.
Ha I came to see if anyone had posted her. I love her Instagram, so much of it is the logistics of moving all the rock out and supplies in. Fascinating problems to solve on a small scale.
One room even features a secret entrance — hidden inside a rocket by the pool. — Ey — pshhh! :-)
I used to live in the inner city of Leipzig during my university days, and we had a door in the basement that led to wartime tunnels connecting it to other houses. It wasn't like a massive maze, just a hub with three other paths, each leading to another house nearby. From there, however, if they'd unlocked their doors, you could travel farther.
I was on a mission back then to befriend and convince random neighbours across the street to open their access doors and get some kind of network going, but I didn't meet with much enthusiasm.
Reading (the largest town in the UK btw) has other tunnels … for example https://www.readingchronicle.co.uk/news/14492484.sneak-a-pea... and there is a rumour of secret escape tunnels from the (medieval) abbey.
Swindon has a significantly larger population than Reading.
dang … guess I am stuck in 1961 https://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/census/EW1961PRE/1?utm_so...
fwiw I just threw this in since many on HN probably don’t know much about Reading
red face
Swindon has been growing like crazy. ~92,000 in 1961 to ~233,000 in 2021. Passing Reading's population in the 90s.
>many on HN probably don’t know much about Reading
Maybe it is better that way. ;0)
It's a city that can be annoyingly hard to Google. If, for example, you search for "Reading Library" you basically get ALL THE LIBRARIES... :)
It's still a town (despite efforts to the contrary).
I actually lived there for a few years, I guess I'd forgotten that the millenium bid fell through :)
Edit: By the by I do intend to visit again at some point if only to see the DEC exhibition at the town museum (if that's still on) and perhaps swing by Sweeney's pie shop (if that's still open).
Oh, and now I see from a sibling comment that there was another bid in 2022! It gives me a twinge of national pride that British rules on City-hood are so weird!
DEC exhibition closed 10 months or so ago, but the museum is still worth visiting for the copy of the Bayeux Tapestry.
Sweeney Todd is still open :)
> DEC exhibition closed 10 months or so ago
Damnit.
The important question is where did the exhibit go.
I can't imagine Swindon being a better town to know than Reading, though.
I know both Reading and Swindon quite well, and prefer Swindon. Subjective, obviously.
when I worked in Swindon (Intel fwiw), HR told all the Americans “draw a circle 15 miles radius around Swindon station and live outside it”
I heard similar about Croydon.
Instructions unclear, living 15 miles out to sea.
Sealand? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand
Ya, I got my lordship cert somewhere.
Interesting. If it wasn't for the outlet mall I would put Swindon on par with Slough.
I thought it was made city status a while back too!
Nope.
"In the end, the 2022 contest saw Reading beaten to the post by Dunfermline, Bangor, Douglas, Doncaster, Wrexham, Colchester, and nearby Milton Keynes. "
https://www.readingchronicle.co.uk/news/25782760.reading-not...
A lot of sources seem to cite Reading as 'England's largest town' but maybe that is by area, rather than population? Also depends on where you put the boundary.
> town
That's where the problem lies. I spend too much of my life screaming into the void about UK addresses and what is and isn't a town :)
It's just about possible to create dataset of towns, cities, villages from mixing and matching and cutting up other geographies from the ONS (e.g. their Parished and Unparished data (though Unparished is its own nightmare), then the ONS Built-Up Areas dataset but... that one cuts out all the non-built parts so Milton Keynes is bunch of big blobs around the residential areas).
But if you frankenstein it, you lose all of the formal connections that define other links, and if you try to cheat via geospatial join, you will link police forces to areas they don't actually serve.
For Swindon, you're kinda stuck glueing together (going from memory here - please correct me if I'm off) the Parishes of Central Swindon, South Swindon and West Swindon. But these will overlap with some villages so it's not a true count.
And that's a natural moment to lead on to the next critical point: how're we measuring population? (I always get that Father Ted speech scene in my head thinking about this, start speaking - then twelve hours later "And now, we move on to liars")
>how're we measuring population?
The UK census seems as good a measure as any.
>The UK census seems as good a measure as any.
Agreed, and it's a reasonable first reach for residential counts.
Problem is, it was last taken during 2021 - at the height of covid - and their estimates have been paying the price of it even since. Anything that touches on workday or employment they actively warn you away from, nowadays.
But then there's the elephant in the room: what if you're looking at somewhere like the City of London (the square mile one) where residential population is somewhere between 8,500 and 9,000 people?
EDIT: it slipped by me!
There is no single UK-wide census. NRS do Scotland's, last in 2022. NISRA handle Northern Ireland's census, last in 2021. And the ONS for England and Wales, last in 2021.
Well, "largest town" changes all the time anyway. Milton Keynes is "larger" than both by more than one metric, but it became a city in 2022.
The whole city status thing is a bit silly. It should definitely be based on more than population, but Milton Keynes getting it firmly established population is all it takes now.
What could possibly be more definitive than the monarch's whim?
It ascended.
Swindon is even shortlisted for UK City of Culture 2029, despite not being a city.
The city of Znojmo in Czech Republic has 4 levels of catacombs and underground passages, 27 km in length:
https://znojmoregion.cz/cs/znojemske-podzemi-znojmo# (switch language to English)
What happened to the waste when the village lived under ground for more than few days ?
The city is on a hill - or more precisely, on a ridge flanked by a river canyon on one side and a valley carved by a smaller stream on the other.
Due to that, the Znojmo catacombs are always above the water table & there was never really issues with drainage. There are a couple natural springs and overflowing wells in the catacombs & they are drained by the so-called Jesuit aqueduct, that collects all the water and drains it into the moat of the city fortification system. Nowadays that part is also underground & it just flows in the the Dyje river.
So during an emergency, the could get rid of the sewage with the aqueduct outflow & store solid was in some sections not in use I guess.
Shitty concrete?
lol, might be like trying to get the doors between adjacent hotel rooms open with strangers.
> convince random neighbours across the street to open their access doors
Would definitely work with kids. if there were a bunch of 10yo kids there would definitely be an underground kids mischief network.
Leipzig is a bit more progressive/alternative, so I can see such a initiative to work out in the right place, but I doubt that today this is still a big thing? Lots of construction and modernisation going on in the city.
I love that you basically tried to start a neighborhood underground transit network and the only thing standing in your way was getting the neighbors to cooperate.
Underground kiez would kill in Berlin
aren't there some abandoned U-Bahn tracks?
Hey! Where exactly was this? Grüße!
There's this British YouTuber who also dug a giant bunker underneath his house. I wonder how on earth did he get the zoning approval.
Quite easily, even retrospectively. It has no impact on his neighbours, doesn't create an eyesore, etc. He had the planning folks round, had them speak to his architect. It's all legit and done the correct way.
Colin Furze - and at least for part of it he didn’t! The council sent him an enforcement notice and he had to get it done retrospectively
His underground garage however has planning permission- you can find it on the council’s planning portal
tbf all of it now has planning permission it was just retrospective, the docs are still published the same way
The listing of the property on the auction site:
https://www.btgeddisonspropertyauctions.com/properties/20260...
It includes many more photos than the article, as well as floor plans for the subterranean areas
Don't miss the linked video tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Vj6FZZc4SE
In my mind it is nice but in the video the reality looks quite creepy!
It's not creepy, plenty of MoD buildings look like that.
Admittedly you don't expect to see one in a random suburb.
There's a story, not sure how true it is, of a contractor being brought in to renovate a recently-vacated government office building of something like 7 storeys. They came back and said "OK, we've looked at the 7 storeys above ground, what about the three below ground?" / "What 3 storeys below ground? There aren't any below ground".
I claim 1% commission if anyone on HN buys it
Has the potential for an "EMP resistant server farm"? Is that a common thing that realtors need to find for their clients?
ChatGPT give me some bullet points for my listing
I'm no chalk-expert, but I'd question whether anything there is deep/shielded enough to qualify.
Even then, it might be far cheaper to build an "EMP resistant" structure aboveground.
Depends on how close you are to the nearest nuke factory
i dunno but i certainly am more intrigued now
No, but it's the kind of narrative that will help bring an above market price by casting its uniqueness as a feature, rather than the default of being a liability for differing from a plain beige box </realtalk>.
I, too, one day dream of using my children as labor for my underground tunnel system. To fight the ant, you must become the ant
I'm joking, but it's heartening to see quirky hobbies by qualified people (he was a civil engineer).
Homes need more whimsey. I recently discovered one of my interior doorways is actually a stone archway that someone had squared off, drywalled and installed a cheap hollow door for no apparent reason. Working with a stonemason to re-point/parge it and bring it back to glory. Will I ever see a return on this investment? Probably not but fuck it it'll make my house just that much cooler.
> I recently discovered one of my interior doorways is actually a stone archway that someone had squared off, drywalled and installed a cheap hollow door for no apparent reason.
£50 to a spat out smartie says that was done in the 1960's, when the fashion was for everything to look smooth and modern.
We had a home with marvelous 1830's wooden panneling that was hidden behind thin sheets of plywood (presumably in the 1960's) that had been nailed over it to provide a smooth look.
Look up Barry Bucknell, a.k.a. Bodger Bucknell, he's responsible for a lot of this stuff. He was a nice guy and meant well, but he also caused an awful lot of damage.
Nobody can afford whimsey anymore because if you are doing anything invasive enough to involve permits then any sort of deviation from the "megacorp cookie cutter" aesthetic becomes a scrutinized liability.
While I get that, it's not like there's not a number of safety concerns with an underground tunnel. Flooding and collapse come to mind as some of the biggest potential problems.
Unfortunately, whimsy and safety are often in conflict with one another.
>"it it'll make my house just that much cooler."
To you it will. To the next buyer it's a liability. In a world where paying off a mortgage was a possibility, this was fine. Now you're beholden to the median desires of the real estate market with every decision you make on your house.
There are two types of homes:
ⓐ: A financial asset where you landlord yourself, always worrying about the valuation by others. Think rectiliniar greige.
ⓑ: Your home, lived in and modified to your wants and whimseys. Often over or under capitalized.
The first home we buy is usually a financial instrument type ⓐ.
If you can buck your initial programming/conditioning, you can get ⓑ with effort and luck.
Indeed it depends where you're at on the ladder. First time home buyer hoping to move up lands squarely in A if you have any sense at all. The goal of course being B when you're in deep equity after decades.
> being B when you're in deep equity after decades
For elderly people a big house can be a liability. It makes a lot of work and you don't need it once the children move out.
However your comment is confusing because you are replying to a sentence about ⓑ, but you're talking about ⓐ.
A big house is sold to people as an investment in future value (ⓐ).
More importantly a big house is often driven by a not-so-hidden desire to show off to others a massive status symbol (a tragic McMansion), and high status is also ⓐ.
Of course a big house can be ⓑ: but it is less common to see crazy money spent on large whims (assuming having enough wealth to be able to burn pointless dollars).
Sorry if I'm mansplaining - but I just don't understand why you'd say something so obvious, while implying something so disconnected.
A ⓑ house can have a high valuation. The thesis of the dichotomy is about intent, not about outcomes. And we often have mixed intents so it isn't as black&white as I stated it.
How is the stone wall that's been holding up my house for over 100 years a liability? You know it's still there even when it's covered with drywall right?
If I had 6 children, I would probably take up tunnelling.
The children yearn for the mines
lowercase m. 15 meters, not 15 million tunnels :D
If you're interested in secret tunnels, check out Colin Furze on Youtube!
Relatively secluded and private, Seymour Cray was also a tunneler... he wouldn't have been making videos about it
The story about him in Time at the time: https://web.archive.org/web/20080521163217/http://www.time.c...
And an article someone wrote later... https://michael-starobin.squarespace.com/blogcontent/digging...Wonder if low oxygen in the tunnels reset his brain or something.
Incubation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubation_(psychology)
> In psychology, incubation refers to the unconscious processing of problems, when they are set aside for a period of time, that may lead to insights. It was originally proposed by Graham Wallas in 1926 as one of his four stages of the creative process: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification.
> ...
> The experience of leaving a problem for a period of time and then finding that the difficulty evaporates on returning to the problem, or, even more striking, that the solution "comes out of the blue" when thinking about something else, is widespread. Many guides to effective thinking and problem solving advise the reader to set problems aside for a time.
I wasn't impressed by the 15 metres, but it turns out that is the maximum depth reached, not the length of a tunnel.
Yeah, I though it was 15 meters of length, not that impressive... but it is 15m underground and '... 1,300 square feet of underground space, including tunnels and storage rooms'.
It's very UK to give depth in metric and area in imperial
Small areas in Imperial, then you move on to number of tennis courts, then number of football pitches, and then to fractions/multiples of Wales.
Just like with pints, a British football pitch is 1.3 times larger than the American one.
not 15 million tunnels :D
That traditionally would be described as “a maze of twisty little passages, all alike”
> check out Colin Furze
I'm waiting for his house to come up on auction in ~50 years or so when he eventually kicks the can. Will certainly be interesting to see how that auction goes, with the entire process being documented so well.
He won't kick the can, it'll be something involving a 25-metre trebuchet and rocket motors at the very least.
If you’re instead interested in a book about a house with 15 million tunnels, read House of Leaves!
This is a very scary horror, tho the book (like other books by the author) is published in a very quality way.
To be fair, 15 million tunnels would make the £300k asking price an absolute bargain
Thank you. I definitely read this as million.
> Thank you. I definitely read this as million.
A small letter `m` would be for milli, aka 10^-3, if it is suffixed by a unit. A `m` alone is the SI unit for length. A capital `M` is the prefix for Mega, aka 10^6.
Please use the normalized units. The starting price for this auction is 300 k£ or about 400 kUS$.
And if interested in underground in general, I can recommend Underland by Robert Macfarlane.
I read it as 15 million tunnels too, was very confused. Thank you!
I figured 15 meters tunnel is not worth mentioning, so had to be 15 miles.
All too frequently we see references to milli bits of memory.
That is still an impressive water table. I wish ours was that low :-)
It's on a hill, which helps :)
The most important comment on this article.
oops … sorry … now fixed
... or 15 milli-tunnels. -)
Anyone interested in this might also be interested in Kala on TikTok. She's been building a tunnel system under her house and documenting it for a couple of years.
https://www.tiktok.com/@engineer.everything?lang=en
I can't quite put my finger on it, but there's something... odd about her approach.
The OG tunnel influencer is, of course, Colin Furze: https://www.youtube.com/@colinfurze
Don't forget Tornado Dave, who is currently burying a plane to add to his underground tunnels
https://www.youtube.com/@Tornado_Dave/videos
Nah, he stopped tunneling.
I've been following her since the beginning. I'm really skeptical 4 years later whether or not it's real at this point because it feels like it's pretty dangerous and expensive and I find it hard to believe she got the permitting necessary to keep digging below the house like that. But I still follow her.
The weird part is her onlyfans-style alternate account which is kind of strange...
I don't know how close you have been following but she did get shut down.
And she had to do a lot to get it permitted and set back up.
"she"
Makeup and fingernails with pickaxes and minecarts. Yeah I totally believe it... Even those experimental archaeology influencers with an excavator working between the cuts were more genuine than that.
Wouldn't it be pretty easy to get made up for the short videos, but not be made up during 99% of the actual work?
I wouldn't be surprised if it's BS but I also don't think makeup and fingernails are the smoking gun.
It would be pretty easy and also pretty unconvincing for anyone who did any manual labor in their life, let alone as backbreaking as mining with a pickaxe.
What is it with Brits and digging tunnelsystems underneath their houses? William Lyttle ("The Mole Man of Hackney"), "I'm just a man who loves to dig".
My grandfather had a kind of similar situation in Genk, Belgium where he bought a house and discovered a whole basement system that spanned a good part of the neighborhood.
There is a lady on TikTok based somewhere in America who is currently digging under her house [1] (old article)
She is a unique person. She knows tons about engineering, concreting etc but then just did a pivot into streaming e-girl.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/lifestyle/tiktok-tunnel-gir...
In my teens I had enjoyed a book series "Tunnels" by Roderick Gordon & Brian Williams. The story cranks the mole fantasy up to 12 & surprise, surprise... it is set in some london downtown.
Maybe above ground space is too limited.
See also Colin Furze https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCp68_FLety0O-n9QU6phsgw
Researching what the article meant by "rocket" (I assumed it was a Britishism), I found this article that includes more pictures.
https://www.aol.com/articles/unassuming-bungalow-hides-netwo...
That’s one big arugula!
aol wtf
AOL has never done me dirty, asked for me to buy cloud data, auto deleted emails. Aim account still going strong for email
You can hide an entrance behind a bookcase because bookcases are common. If you stick a 23ft rocket on something you are not hiding it.
300k in Tilehurst for a house with a pool is incredibly cheap.
[Looks at interior photos]
Ah. Anyway.
Curious how he got planning permission. Or if he got planning permission.
> Curious how he got planning permission. Or if he got planning permission.
The answer lies in your first sentence:
> 300k in Tilehurst for a house with a pool is incredibly cheap.
It’s been there long enough to pass any enforcement limits
Somewhat related, tunneling was once taken rather seriously in Liverpool: http://www.williamsontunnels.co.uk/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williamson_Tunnels
Freestanding house with a pool for 300k? That is incredibly cheap. Perhaps I should move there.
Auction pricing.
It'll start out at £300k (to market it attractively) and end up selling for £500k+.
Especially as it has planning permission for two dwellings - a 5 bed house where the pool currently is, and a three bed house where the workshop is located.
Hopefully its not bought just to be turned into apartments and the tunnels sealed off with concrete.
What is wrong with creating more housing for more people? Seems like something the UK could use right now.
Check the pictures, this doesn't look like a house to me. 2 levels of workshop areas and an office area. Also the swimming pool is in the front yard, thats a weird one.
As far as I can tell, the actual house is missing. This is the outbuildings and tunnels and associated non-dwelling rooms only, and planning permission exists to build a house on this land. I suspect you won't get planning permission to use what is there as a house, but instead are required to replace this with a house according to the approved plans.
Perhaps they split the previous house out into its own plot and sold it separately.
Correct.
It looks quite clear that they have split/subdivided their plot. In Australia this would be called a battle-axe property. The listing talks about "land associated with 123 Street Address".
They are basically selling off the far back garden of the main house. A long thin access road, the pool, the glasshouse/conservatory, the workshop, the tunnels, and the planning permission.
UK money. Still that works out to about $400k in us dollars. You can find better deals in the US, but probably none with tunnels - and unlikely to be places you want to live though not bad places (bad places in the US that would be around $120k)
> You can find better deals in the US, but probably none with tunnels
I once came across a middle-of-nowhere midwestern house auction listing by the US government. It came with a detached 5-vehicle garage, and an attached multistory underground hole I assumed was a missile silo. I can't remember the exact starting price, but it was significantly lower than $400k IIRC.
I think you can find a freestanding house in former DDR for less than 300k but it will certainly not come with a pool! Maybe a mud puddle if you are lucky.
I know people who bought an entire train station in the former DDR for less than 100EU ...
It does seem cheap for a house in Reading, even factoring in that it is a bungalow. Maybe they factored in increased subsidence risk?
There's a bunch of potentially unpermitted tunnels under the property. Quite the liability.
How this works in the UK normally is when you're knee deep in the purchase process you have to get legal searches and a survey and the lawyers or surveyor will find the tunnels have no permissions and then you will not be able to borrow money to buy the property because no bank will lend when there is an adverse survey or there are legal questions associated.
You can get these types of things sorted (eg apply for retroactive planning permission) and the council will send a surveyor and give you an opinion but you are running the risk that they insist you either make it good (remedy anything they don't think was done right) or (worst case scenario) tell you to put it back like it was before the unpermitted work was done. This happens more often than people think.
That's why the house has been reduced in price so much - to find someone who feels like the headache is worth it. I have my doubts to be honest.
Planning permission isn't required if what is there has been established for over ten years without objection. I suspect that's the case here.
However, I think you're right that no bank will lend. They expect only a cash buyer who can "regularise" it and sell it on at considerable expense. Hence the price.
Apparently they have planning permission approved already to build houses on this land.
And if they were permitted you'd still have the liability. It's not like the permitting authority is gonna say "aw well we let you do it this is on us" if something happens.
"Real" liability of the "if something happens I'm on the hook" kind is not what's driving down the value here. What's driving down the value is that now that there's a bunch of pictures floating around the internet the tunnels are worthless because some government inspector could choose on a whim to force you to fill them in at your expense (which you would presumably fight, expensively, in court).
Suspiciously cheap. There are no detached (what we call 'freestanding') properties on Right Move in the area under £400k. The cheapest is £450k
EDIT: oops, forgot to select the 'Bungalow' filter too (ugh). 2 properties: £375k and £350k (very small, 60m2). Still...nothing detached around £300k
EDIT2: ohh auction...230m2...yeh won't go for £300k, way more
Germany uses freistehendes Haus, hence my use of "freestanding house".
Detached sounds funny, as if the house was previously attached to another but not anymore. Like how you can only be divorced or widowed after being married to someone.
This isn't a house, it's a Bond villain's starter home
For a number of years I lived near "Mole House" in Hackney, London. The tunnels the guy dug there were ultimately illegal (no consent) and filled in. I wonder what the story for this house is, how he obtained permission to do this.
This kind of activity has been repeated enough times to be an article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_tunneling
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/93958275
The YouTube video is insane
https://youtu.be/_Vj6FZZc4SE?si=mnSwcELl-hPWRSft
I read the headline and thought "Colin Furze selling his bunker?"
I wonder how much water ingress is an issue and what measures have been taken to prevent the tunnels filling with water? Perhaps something about the geology prevents it from happening, but I’d normally expected some sort of sump pump evening for a lot of cellars.
Cool! Here's another example of a tunnel house: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forestiere_Underground_Gardens
That 15 meters underground, not 15 million tunnels.
The title is "not even" clickbait, just very confusing.
"The unique complex contains more than 1,300 square feet of underground space, including tunnels and storage rooms - and even a hand-built railway."
(Edit: I mean the original article, not the submission)
well I (the submitter) messed up and wrote 15M in the submission title (note the cap) in error just to add to the confusion (now fixed, soz.) … I thought “best” just to repeat the article title
No worries, I take issue with the person who concocted the original title. I got here after the capital-M change and it was still confusing that they didn't mention the space that was dug out at this depth, instead paint a picture of a system of tunnels under a normal house(?)
To add to the confusion, my nation is today fighting against an enemy which did on fact dig hundreds of kilometres of underground tunnels under homes.
sorry for the capital M … I have fixed in the title to 15m as in metres
that’s ~ 45 ft underground, I believe … perhaps not that impressive, but quite funny since I would hesitate to undermine my own house and surely this makes it worth less
It’s always fun finding these. You have asbestos awareness, unknown utilities, and yeah some random person has just been digging tunnels… Where does that go in the risk assessment?
Reminds me how rich people in historic areas of London took on the habit of extending their properties downwards, keeping the above-ground parts intact due to conservation laws.
Then everyone acted surprised when entire streets started sinking, or whole buildings collapsed into the ground: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/nov/03/london-stree...
That's because London is on clay. The Reading guy was mostly on chalk (and was himself an engineer). It sounds like the water table was a long way down as well. Soft clay or waterlogged sand are more like digging a hole in a bowl of custard. There are a lot of things that can go wrong - in the case of clay, even if you don't collapse the hole the clay can expand for years afterwards ("heave").
Hmm having said that, the nearest borehole record shows chalk doesn't start until 26 feet down: https://api.bgs.ac.uk/sobi-scans/v1/borehole/scans/items/423... Before that it's sand, gravel, etc. Odd. Record from 1896, but it won't have changed.
Doing underground expansion correctly won’t cause streets to sink.
If anyone wants to see someone dig tunnels under their house I strongly suggest checking out Colin Furze on Youtube!
would love to see the radon measurements in those tunnels/basement.
Is that an issue in the UK?
In granite bedrock areas such as Cornwall, yes, radon is a significant concern that requires measurement and usually remediation (extraction fans).
The chalk bedrock in Reading isn't generally susceptible to radon.
UK radon mapping data: https://www.ukradon.org/information/ukmaps
The map shows Reading does have some radon. Probably not at such a level most people do anything about it, but for a basement you'd definitely be better safe than sorry.
It is in some areas with a lot of granite, such as Cornwall. I'm not aware it is a factor in Reading.
Granite tends to contain Radon as it's in the decay chain of Uranium, which is often found in Granite.
It comes out of the ground. UK has some of that I think.
Tunnels and basements just trap it so it can't blow away.
Very much so.
Here's the actual ad, as opposed to a journalist writing about it:
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/93958275
So is it the house or just the tunnels? Because the listing says “land associated with”…
What are those dark brown cylinder shapes in the sides of the roughly hewn tunnel (first image on the right)?
My hunch: Sound-deadening baffles.
By definition tunnels are underground. 15m deep would have got us there. The headline could be width or height!
oh, i assumed width, was super unimpressed and didn't bother reading the article. 15m is nothing.
>EMP resistant server farm
They sure know their target audience - online prepper crowd
Although the claim was that chalk was self-supporting, I wouldn't be comfortable in those tunnels without shoring up the ceiling.
Hm i dont know ,if they were MY tunnels i would be ok with them there.Someone elses tunnels just rub me the wrong way , like stepping in someone elses house with the furniture still there.
I thought it meant 15 million underground tunnels
archived; no ads or trackers: https://nonograph.com/house-with-15m-underground-tunnels-on-...
Any update on this? Assuming you're involved. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48070516
It is kinda nice to be copying based because it's highly reliable (against paywalls, blocking, IP bans, .onion services and other domain name thingies). It would be cool if there was some sort of reputation system. Obviously on top of the promise above.
Archive.today is great, except for the Google captcha. It's no small feat to run an archiving service especially against copyright law–the archive.today guy seems a bit crazy–I still have mad respect for him.
Something that the people who keep submitting these links get wrong, is on Hacker News you're supposed to submit the original link and then the archive / bypass in the comments. Hacker News is not against against Nongraph or something, most archive.today mirrors are also banned for post submissions.
15 meters deep underground in 4 levels, not just a 15 meters long tunnel.
>1,300 square feet of underground space, including tunnels and storage rooms - and even a hand-built railway.
This misses the most important question.
Why is it for sale?
Says it’s vacant. Says guy started in the 80s. Going to deduce he is/was older and moving on for any number of normal reasons. Why is the reason so important?
Looking at the pictures, my best guess is that the maintenance has been an issue for some time.
So you just go digging under neighbours properties? What about underground infrastructure?
I don’t think it extends beyond property limits.
That hidden underground complex definitely has "growth" potential with "green" credentials
15 meters is a tragedy. 15 million is a statistic.
Anyone else seen “Barbarian”? Might have to start an Airbnb…
This is a link to the auctioneer page, which has all of the same information but is not pay walled.
https://www.btgeddisonspropertyauctions.com/news/going-under...
Hopefully the next proprietor(s) doesn't indulge in some Fritzl type shit.
128sqm below ground level is merely similar to a relatively small apartment: not a lot of area. I think you could get more genuinely usable area from renovating a garage in many cases. That's partly because it's more likely to have fresh air, light, and both level and long item (eg. furniture) access. Not to mention ceiling height and structural stability.
128m is a large house
Apologies. I am from Australia we have the largest houses in the world, or used to. Even bigger than the yankees, historically. These days you'd be lucky!
Some people really love tunnels. Personally I always wanted a house with two basements. Or maybe more. Probably inspired by the 2002 movie Resident Evil.
15m is… almost nothing?
By all means, show us the endless network of cavernous tunnels you've hand-dug under your own home, then.
Depth, not length
Ah that changes everything.
15 metres? Given that your average two storey house is much less than 10m tall in total I wouldn't say 15m is "nothing".
I mean that’s a hallway not a “subterranean network”.
You have a 15m high hallway?
It's got a lot of interesting qualities, but it looks like a dungeon… Not quite put the lotion in the basket type.. but close.
The masculine urge to dig...
Fans of Wind Rose (the band) maybe?
Maybe I missed it through all the ads, but it's pretty disappointing that there is no direct link to the listing?
This is the listing. You can click through pictures of it all. The rocket entrance is amazing.
https://www.btgeddisonspropertyauctions.com/properties/20260...
Colin Furze has entered the chat.
That was my first thought. Then I wondered why it was talking about Reading rather than Lincolnshire.
sorry for the ads … but this made me smile
You'd probably be interested in this person's work: https://youtu.be/6CLF4QrYmYg
Ha I came to see if anyone had posted her. I love her Instagram, so much of it is the logistics of moving all the rock out and supplies in. Fascinating problems to solve on a small scale.
oh yeah! tunnel merch
The online versions of local British Newspapers are almost unreadable now with all the chumbox ads and continual page repainting. Ugh.
I didn't see a single ad. Why not use an ad blocker, or just use Brave?
Can't access this site - wants me to enable some form of tracking that my DNS doesn't allow. Alternate source?