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.
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>.
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'.
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$.
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.
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.
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'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...
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.
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.
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)
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.
> 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.
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.
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").
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://znojmoregion.cz/cs/znojemske-podzemi-znojmo# (switch language to English)
fwiw I just threw this in since many on HN probably don’t know much about Reading
red face
>many on HN probably don’t know much about Reading
Maybe it is better that way. ;0)
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!
Sweeney Todd is still open :)
"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.
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")
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.
> 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://www.btgeddisonspropertyauctions.com/properties/20260...
It includes many more photos than the article, as well as floor plans for the subterranean areas
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/93958275
If you're interested in secret tunnels, check out Colin Furze on Youtube!
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”
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'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.
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.
They sure know their target audience - online prepper crowd
https://www.aol.com/articles/unassuming-bungalow-hides-netwo...
Perhaps they split the previous house out into its own plot and sold it separately.
It'll start out at £300k (to market it attractively) and end up selling for £500k+.
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.
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.
"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).
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
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.
https://www.btgeddisonspropertyauctions.com/news/going-under...
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...
"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
[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.
The chalk bedrock in Reading isn't generally susceptible to radon.
UK radon mapping data: https://www.ukradon.org/information/ukmaps
Tunnels and basements just trap it so it can't blow away.
Why is it for sale?
https://www.btgeddisonspropertyauctions.com/properties/20260...