House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k
readingchronicle.co.uk113 points by librasteve 7 hours ago
113 points by librasteve 7 hours ago
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 :)
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 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.
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.
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
Has the potential for an "EMP resistant server farm"? Is that a common thing that realtors need to find for their clients?
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>.
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...
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."
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”
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.
And if interested in underground in general, I can recommend Underland by Robert Macfarlane.
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$.
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.
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.
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?
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 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
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...
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...
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
Freestanding house with a pool for 300k? That is incredibly cheap. Perhaps I should move there.
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.
Auction pricing.
It'll start out at £300k (to market it attractively) and end up selling for £500k+.
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.
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.
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
Cool! Here's another example of a tunnel house: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forestiere_Underground_Gardens
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").
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
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.
What are those dark brown cylinder shapes in the sides of the roughly hewn tunnel (first image on the right)?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Colin Furze has entered the chat.
That was my first thought. Then I wondered why it was talking about Reading rather than Lincolnshire.
15 meters is a tragedy. 15 million is a statistic.
15m is… almost nothing?
By all means, show us the endless network of cavernous tunnels you've hand-dug under your own home, then.
15 metres? Given that your average two storey house is much less than 10m tall in total I wouldn't say 15m is "nothing".
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.
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...
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.
The online versions of local British Newspapers are almost unreadable now with all the chumbox ads and continual page repainting. Ugh.
[dead]
The masculine urge to dig...
Can't access this site - wants me to enable some form of tracking that my DNS doesn't allow. Alternate source?