BT to sell off 'secret World War II tunnels'

BT is looking for a new buyer for its "secret World War II tunnels".

The mile-long Kingsway Tunnels have a chequered history, starting off life in the early 1940s as air raid shelter designed to hold 8,000 people and later briefly taken over by MI6 for storage.

The tunnels, which run 100 feet underground below Holborn, in London, also played home to 400 tonnes of sensitive documents from the Public Records Office in 1945 and were later transferred to the Post Office and then onto BT in 1984 when the telco was privatised.

BT used the tunnels as trunk exchange, connecting long distance calls before the STD (subscriber trunk dialling) code was introduced. According to the telco, the exchange routed the hotline between the US President and his Russian counterpart in the 1950s.

In the 1980s, the tunnels were the base for BT's data back-up services and also the telco's London Area Group.

Some 25 years after first taking over the tunnels, BT is now hoping to find a new owner for them.

A BT spokesman said the tunnels have been unused for some 15 to 20 years, with the decision to sell them prompted by Griff Rhys Jones.

The spokesman said: "It was that Griff Rhys Jones show where he goes around New York, London, Paris looking at old buildings. Last week he was in New York, yesterday he was in London. They approached us earlier on in the year and said 'Can we have a look around your tunnels?' and we said 'yes, we're trying to sell them'."

The telco reckons a government body or large company might prove a likely buyer. According to the spokesman, no offers on the tunnels have been received yet.