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.
fwiw I just threw this in since many on HN probably don’t know much about Reading
red face
hermitcrab 2 hours ago [-]
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)
dcminter 2 hours ago [-]
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... :)
hermitcrab 2 hours ago [-]
It's still a town (despite efforts to the contrary).
dcminter 19 minutes ago [-]
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!
choult 17 seconds ago [-]
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 :)
philipallstar 25 minutes ago [-]
I can't imagine Swindon being a better town to know than Reading, though.
jimlikeslimes 2 hours ago [-]
I thought it was made city status a while back too!
hermitcrab 2 hours ago [-]
Nope.
"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.
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.
Freak_NL 2 hours ago [-]
I wasn't impressed by the 15 metres, but it turns out that is the maximum depth reached, not the length of a tunnel.
tecleandor 2 hours ago [-]
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'.
mrwh 2 hours ago [-]
It's very UK to give depth in metric and area in imperial
alexfoo 46 minutes ago [-]
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.
curiousObject 1 hours ago [-]
not 15 million tunnels :D
That traditionally would be described as “a maze of twisty little passages, all alike”
hidelooktropic 2 hours ago [-]
Thank you. I definitely read this as million.
wincy 2 hours ago [-]
If you’re instead interested in a book about a house with 15 million tunnels, read House of Leaves!
wafflemaker 2 hours ago [-]
This is a very scary horror, tho the book (like other books by the author) is published in a very quality way.
Scubabear68 2 hours ago [-]
I read it as 15 million tunnels too, was very confused. Thank you!
kzrdude 2 hours ago [-]
I figured 15 meters tunnel is not worth mentioning, so had to be 15 miles.
triceratops 1 hours ago [-]
The most important comment on this article.
foobarian 2 hours ago [-]
That is still an impressive water table. I wish ours was that low :-)
librasteve 2 hours ago [-]
oops … sorry … now fixed
fusslo 2 hours ago [-]
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).
spyspy 2 hours ago [-]
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.
cucumber3732842 41 minutes ago [-]
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.
hermitcrab 2 hours ago [-]
If I had 6 children, I would probably take up tunnelling.
WithinReason 2 hours ago [-]
The children yearn for the mines
runako 2 hours ago [-]
Researching what the article meant by "rocket" (I assumed it was a Britishism), I found this article that includes more pictures.
AOL has never done me dirty, asked for me to buy cloud data, auto deleted emails. Aim account still going strong for email
lftl 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Freestanding house with a pool for 300k? That is incredibly cheap. Perhaps I should move there.
manarth 2 hours ago [-]
Auction pricing.
It'll start out at £300k (to market it attractively) and end up selling for £500k+.
bluGill 2 hours ago [-]
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)
aeyes 2 hours ago [-]
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.
hermitcrab 2 hours ago [-]
It does seem cheap for a house in Reading, even factoring in that it is a bungalow. Maybe they factored in increased subsidence risk?
yourusername 2 hours ago [-]
There's a bunch of potentially unpermitted tunnels under the property. Quite the liability.
seanhunter 3 minutes ago [-]
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.
cucumber3732842 40 minutes ago [-]
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).
gib444 2 hours ago [-]
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
2 hours ago [-]
rzerowan 59 minutes ago [-]
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.
meindnoch 2 hours ago [-]
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").
cortesoft 16 minutes ago [-]
Doing underground expansion correctly won’t cause streets to sink.
dotancohen 3 hours ago [-]
That 15 meters underground, not 15 million tunnels.
rzzzt 2 hours ago [-]
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)
librasteve 2 hours ago [-]
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
rzzzt 2 hours ago [-]
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(?)
dotancohen 15 minutes ago [-]
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.
librasteve 2 hours ago [-]
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
What are those dark brown cylinder shapes in the sides of the roughly hewn tunnel (first image on the right)?
zulux 2 hours ago [-]
My hunch: Sound-deadening baffles.
TheOtherHobbes 2 hours ago [-]
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.
traxler 2 hours ago [-]
This misses the most important question.
Why is it for sale?
conductr 51 minutes ago [-]
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?
b3lvedere 1 hours ago [-]
Looking at the pictures, my best guess is that the maintenance has been an issue for some time.
2 hours ago [-]
aeve890 2 hours ago [-]
15 meters deep underground in 4 levels, not just a 15 meters long tunnel.
WillAdams 15 minutes ago [-]
>1,300 square feet of underground space, including tunnels and storage rooms - and even a hand-built railway.
2 hours ago [-]
werdnapk 2 hours ago [-]
So you just go digging under neighbours properties? What about underground infrastructure?
Sharlin 2 hours ago [-]
I don’t think it extends beyond property limits.
2 hours ago [-]
jvanderbot 2 hours ago [-]
would love to see the radon measurements in those tunnels/basement.
fred_is_fred 2 hours ago [-]
Is that an issue in the UK?
manarth 2 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
hermitcrab 2 hours ago [-]
It is in some areas with a lot of granite, such as Cornwall. I'm not aware it is a factor in Reading.
wafflemaker 2 hours ago [-]
Granite tends to contain Radon as it's in the decay chain of Uranium, which is often found in Granite.
jvanderbot 2 hours ago [-]
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.
louthy 2 hours ago [-]
Very much so.
Archit3ch 2 hours ago [-]
15 meters is a tragedy. 15 million is a statistic.
andai 2 hours ago [-]
The masculine urge to dig...
harvey9 17 minutes ago [-]
Fans of Wind Rose (the band) maybe?
dyauspitr 1 hours ago [-]
15m is… almost nothing?
globular-toast 5 minutes ago [-]
15 metres? Given that your average two storey house is much less than 10m tall in total I wouldn't say 15m is "nothing".
Simulacra 1 hours ago [-]
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.
x187463 2 hours ago [-]
Colin Furze has entered the chat.
alexfoo 47 minutes ago [-]
That was my first thought. Then I wondered why it was talking about Reading rather than Lincolnshire.
2 hours ago [-]
dgrin91 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe I missed it through all the ads, but it's pretty disappointing that there is no direct link to the listing?
thorin 2 hours ago [-]
This is the listing. You can click through pictures of it all. The rocket entrance is amazing.
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.
2 hours ago [-]
librasteve 2 hours ago [-]
oh yeah! tunnel merch
hermitcrab 2 hours ago [-]
The online versions of local British Newspapers are almost unreadable now with all the chumbox ads and continual page repainting. Ugh.
tejohnso 2 hours ago [-]
I didn't see a single ad. Why not use an ad blocker, or just use Brave?
467593457091 11 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
b800h 46 minutes ago [-]
Can't access this site - wants me to enable some form of tracking that my DNS doesn't allow. Alternate source?
Rendered at 15:44:45 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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.
https://www.btgeddisonspropertyauctions.com/properties/20260...
It includes many more photos than the article, as well as floor plans for the subterranean areas
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...That traditionally would be described as “a maze of twisty little passages, all alike”
I'm joking, but it's heartening to see quirky hobbies by qualified people (he was a civil engineer).
https://www.aol.com/articles/unassuming-bungalow-hides-netwo...
https://www.tiktok.com/@engineer.everything?lang=en
It'll start out at £300k (to market it attractively) and end up selling for £500k+.
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.
"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
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.
Why is it for sale?
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.
https://www.btgeddisonspropertyauctions.com/properties/20260...