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.
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$.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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 whims (assuming enough wealth to be able to burn 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
If you were doing that in any historic British location you'd want to buy one of the old ROTOR radar sites I think. They had sprawling underground bunkers whose entrance was disguised by a normal-looking bungalow concealing a tunnel down to the bunker. There's loads of these sites but the technology was quickly obsoleted by better radars so many closed down not long after they opened and were abandoned outright, although some were reused for other things.
While the surface structures are usually demolished or ruined, a lot of the bunkers still physically exist and they're considered top-tier urbex targets. They've all been long since stripped of the 1950s radar equipment (along with everything else), and many have been further ruined by vandals, but you could build an absolutely top-tier secure server farm in one if you had deep enough pockets. Given they were designed from the outset to reject the considerable heat of thermionic 1950s radars, they might not be a horrible place to put servers underground. They're also designed to be defensible, apparently they were designed to survive a near-miss from a Hiroshima-style nuclear weapon.
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".
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").
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?
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.
182 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 34.8 ms ] threadIf you're interested in secret tunnels, check out Colin Furze on Youtube!
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$.
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...> 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.
That traditionally would be described as “a maze of twisty little passages, all alike”
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.
live by the sword, etc.
"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)
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
I'm joking, but it's heartening to see quirky hobbies by qualified people (he was a civil engineer).
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.
ⓐ: 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.
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.
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 whims (assuming enough wealth to be able to burn 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.
£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.
https://www.aol.com/articles/unassuming-bungalow-hides-netwo...
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.
> 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.
https://znojmoregion.cz/cs/znojemske-podzemi-znojmo# (switch language to English)
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.
https://www.btgeddisonspropertyauctions.com/properties/20260...
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.
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'll start out at £300k (to market it attractively) and end up selling for £500k+.
"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).
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.
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.
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.
https://www.btgeddisonspropertyauctions.com/properties/20260...
It includes many more photos than the article, as well as floor plans for the subterranean areas
Even then, it might be far cheaper to build an "EMP resistant" structure aboveground.
While the surface structures are usually demolished or ruined, a lot of the bunkers still physically exist and they're considered top-tier urbex targets. They've all been long since stripped of the 1950s radar equipment (along with everything else), and many have been further ruined by vandals, but you could build an absolutely top-tier secure server farm in one if you had deep enough pockets. Given they were designed from the outset to reject the considerable heat of thermionic 1950s radars, they might not be a horrible place to put servers underground. They're also designed to be defensible, apparently they were designed to survive a near-miss from a Hiroshima-style nuclear weapon.
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".
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...
[Looks at interior photos]
Ah. Anyway.
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.
Why is it for sale?
https://www.tiktok.com/@engineer.everything?lang=en
The OG tunnel influencer is, of course, Colin Furze: https://www.youtube.com/@colinfurze
https://www.youtube.com/@Tornado_Dave/videos
The weird part is her onlyfans-style alternate account which is kind of strange...
And she had to do a lot to get it permitted and set back up.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's BS but I also don't think makeup and fingernails are the smoking gun.
maybe shes swapping nails and hair for overalls and a pickaxe, but given just how much fake BS is on the 'gram or 'tok, it's safer to just assume fake