Tunnels That Inspired Bond Films to Become Tourist Site

There's a history-rich part of London that few people have seen, where the city braced for the Blitz, James Bond's creator got inspiration, and secret Cold War messages passed between Washington and Moscow. It's a network of tunnels 100 feet below the streets that was secret for decades, but which now could be the city's next big tourist destination. Local authorities have approved plans to fill the 90,000 square-foot site with an intelligence museum, an interactive World War II memorial, and one of the world's deepest underground bars, per the AP. "It's an amazing space," said Angus Murray, chief executive of the London Tunnels. "And I think it tells a wonderful story."

• Vast bomb shelter: The tunnels lie directly below London Underground's Central line in the city's Holborn area. Work to dig them began in secret in 1940, when Britain feared invasion by Nazi Germany. They were designed to shelter up to 8,000 people in a pair of parallel tunnels 16 1/2 feet wide and 1,300 feet long. The tunnels were never used for that purpose; by the time they were finished in 1942, the worst of the Blitz was over, and Underground bosses had opened up subway stations as air raid shelters for Londoners.

• James Bond angle: The tunnels instead became a government communications center and a base for the Special Operations Executive, a clandestine unit that sent agents on perilous sabotage missions in Nazi-occupied territory. A naval officer named Ian Fleming was a liaison officer to the SOE, and the subterranean HQ may have provided inspiration for the world of secret agent 007 that he went on to create.
• Postwar: After the war, more tunnels were added to the complex and the site became a secure telephone exchange. From the mid-1950s it was a terminus of the first trans-Atlantic undersea telephone cable. After the Cuban missile crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in 1962, a "red telephone" hotline between the Pentagon and the Kremlin was established and ran through here.
• After that: For a time, the site also housed a bunker to be used by the government in the event of nuclear war. By the 1980s, technology had moved on, and British Telecom moved out. The tunnels lay largely forgotten until BT sold them in 2023 to Murray's private equity-backed group.
• Future: London Tunnels aims to open in 2028, and to attract up to 4.2 million tourists a year. More here.

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