Going underground: Tours into the subterranean

Abstract

This paper explores the neglected topic of subterranean tourism and seeks to distinguish the particular factors that continue to lure tourists to underground attractions. Through a literature review and research of numerous sites, we identify three key themes through which underground tourism has remained alluring, namely an enduring desire to visit formerly inaccessible or forbidden spaces, the vivid depictions of subterranean worlds stoked by literature and film, and desires to enter realms of sensory alterity. We subsequently detail our tours to four very different human-fashioned underground sites: Margate’s mysterious Shell Grotto, West Wycombe’s scandal-plagued 18th century Hellfire Caves, Charing Cross disused Jubilee Line tube station, and Drakeford Nuclear Bunker. Each example exemplifies the general themes we have identified and yet every site has its own peculiarities and allurements, as we discuss in our conclusion.

Introduction

Across the Social Sciences and Humanities, there has been a recent turn towards the volumetric, with a reinvigorated exploration of what lies above and beneath the surface. This has critically questioned a hitherto overwhelmingly horizontal perspective (Squire and Dodds, 2020) and explored a wide diversity of aerial and subterranean spaces (Bosworth, 2024). As Connor and McNeill (2022: 1) note, cities typically ‘stand on a complex layering of catacombs, tunnels, remnants and artefacts, pipes, sewers, cables and shafts’. These historic infrastructures and networks have been continuously updated and supplemented by underground railways, military bunkers, storage spaces and vast underground urban environments. Billé (2022) points out how the subterranean is increasingly becoming a new frontier of capital accumulation. For example, upmarket areas of London are being dramatically reconfigured by numerous luxury ‘mega-basements’ built by the super-rich, replete with cinemas, pools, bars, gyms and libraries (Burrows et al., 2022), while growing numbers of American subterranean preppers aim ‘to retain security, sustainability and luxury across times of anthropogenic turmoil’ (Garrett, 2021: 402).

While this multi-layered underground realm has been ceaselessly shaped by political planning, capitalist exploitation and state control, it also serves as ‘a space of subversion, danger, risk, illegality, insurgency, and resistance’ (Connor and McNeill, 2022: 3). For instance, Billé (2022 145) points out that tunnels ‘constitute vectors of movement that elude, challenge, and complicate surficial inscriptions’, notably of administrative and national boundaries - witness the Palestinian tunnels as resistance to the fixed borders of the Israeli state and the elusive underground military infrastructures of North Korea.

Across popular culture widespread media stories have gripped audiences, underpinning how the subterranean spawns multiple imaginaries and stories. Two global news stories have recently highlighted the perils of the underground: the rescue of 33 trapped Chilean Miners after 69 days in 2010, and the young football team in Thailand who became trapped in a flooded cave in 2018, with narratives focussing on their vulnerability and the heroism of the divers who saved them. Reports about the Large Hadron Collider, a particle accelerator built by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) that runs along an underground tunnel 27 km long between France and Switzerland, promises to advance knowledge about matter, the universe, time and space. And nature documentaries disclose how previously unknown amphibians, gastropods, insects, crustacea and fish have recently been discovered in hitherto unexplored caves in Bermuda, India, South Korea, Croatia and Serbia. This renewed fascination with the underground is perhaps signified by Macfarlane’s (2019) hugely popular book, Underland, in which he investigates mychorrizal networks, prehistoric caves, vast undersea mining tunnels, military labyrinths, seed depositories and moulins, deep crevasses carved by glaciers.

However, although the subterranean has been a fertile ground for academic attention, the enduring and growing appeal of underground tourist sites has received little attention (see Subterranea Brittanica, n.d. for an extensive list of underground tourist attractions). This is surprising given their long history, most obviously the limestone show-caves promoted in Victorian times, the Paris catacombs, industrial mines and 18th century grottoes. This paper seeks to initiate a broader study of underground tourism to redress this lacuna, investigating why it is that subterranean attractions have an enduring appeal for tourists.

In the first section, in order to initiate thinking about the study of subterranean tourism, we identify three key themes through which underground attractions exert a potent allure for tourists. First, we suggest that a desire to experience formerly hidden infrastructures and functions lures tourists to certain subterranean settings. Second, we consider the diverse myths, stories and films that constitute a key element in marketing and narrating tourist sites in situ. Third, we investigate how the subsurface offers distinctive sensations that diverge from those experienced in the familiar worlds above ground. In the second section we extend the discussion by investigating the specific allurements of four English subterranean tourist enterprises, Margate’s Shell Grotto, The Hellfire Caves, a disused London Underground Station and a former nuclear bunker.

The Allure of underground attractions

Subterranean concealment: Infrastructures and industries

Desires to visit previously forbidden or inaccessible realms lure tourists to many subterranean sites. Underground places once deemed dangerous are made accessible, the former domains of secret societies or criminal enterprises are opened up after many years, mysterious and forgotten underground places are newly discovered and obscure, exhausted industrial sites of extraction are converted into tourist attractions. Encountering such formerly prohibited places constitutes the witnessing of a subterranean ‘backstage’ (MacCannell, 1999) wherein formerly mysterious architectures, secret spaces, technologies and gathering places are disclosed.

At certain underground sites, once hidden infrastructure is revealed and explained. Under contemporary late capitalism, Schwanen and Nixon (2019: 147) argue, a renewed academic focus on everyday infrastructures for ‘transport, communication, digital data, water, energy’ investigates the ‘speeding up the circulation of people, consumer goods, capital, information, practices and ideas’. In opening up ‘epistemological spaces for economic, social and political calculation’ (Melo Zurita et al., 2018: 301), the subterranean is increasingly subject to the expansion of practical scientific knowledge about mineral extraction, military uses, sewage disposal, storage, energy supply and water provision. Yet this exploitation of the underground has evolved over centuries and has characteristically been strategically concealed to ‘enclose and congeal power’ (Berlant, 2016: 403), whether economic, military or state. It is precisely this suppression that engenders curiosity amongst visitors to formerly inaccessible subterranean infrastructures that are repurposed as tourist attractions. This fascination is not new. For instance, in 19th century Paris and London, visitors were invited to marvel at the spectacular sewers and transport infrastructures under construction that symbolised the technological sublime, national pride and heroic engineering (Pike, 2019).

Many formerly secret underground military infrastructural sites have been recently refashioned as tourist attractions, including nuclear bunkers and war rooms (such as Churchill’s War Room in London) and the Cu Chi tunnels deployed by the Viet Cong during the Vietnam war. Scheduled to open in 2028, the mile-long Kingsway Exchange Tunnels in central London, formerly a World War Two and Cold War facility, is currently being converted into an extensive, heritage-oriented, highly designed, multi-sensual tourist attraction, replete with bar.

Disused underground industrial heritage sites have also been repurposed for tourism. For instance, Zgłobicki et al. (2023: 83) detail how Polish mining tourism ‘combines industrial, technological, cultural and ethnographic heritage’, as well as geotourism. Mines that once extracted salt, oil, coal, chalk, silver and gold offer tours that explain former infrastructural technologies and working conditions. In assessing tourist practices towards these industrial subterranean realms, Pike (2019) identifies ‘the engineer’s gaze’, a mode of observing that scrutinises modern technology alongside a tourist gaze that beholds natural wonders and historic relics. In addition, the mysterious, occult and criminal historical uses of other secret underground realms invite tourists to speculate on their origins, meanings and the subversive and illicit activities they hosted.

Having become detached from the technological networks and uses that once sustained them, many subterranean sites are being enfolded within the very different, informational, retailing, transport, safety, audio-visual and guiding infrastructures of tourism (Adey and Lisle, 2025).

Subterranean stories

Telling stories is often regarded as an essential existential aspect of being human, a means of gaining knowledge, maintaining personal and shared identities and communicating meanings and values. Reflecting the broader recent social science emphasis on the key role of stories in the production of place, Moscardo (2020) considers the important role that stories play in the promotion, design and interpretation of tourist sites through guided tours, audio-visual presentations, information boards and increasingly, via digital media. These selective tales are supplemented by the stories told by tourists about their experiences, adding to the circulation of narratives around attractions. Further, tales may be recounted in fictional works such as novels and films that stimulate visits to locations amongst literary (Çevik, 2020) and film tourists (Connell, 2012).

As with other places, at underground tourist sites certain themes tend to be articulated. This foregrounds the recognition that stories can become fixed; they often resonate with the concerns and values of the powerful, but they are typically subject to contestation, reinterpretation and replacement (Kothari et al., 2026). Stories of underground worlds have been diversely imbued with desires, fears and fantasies, supernatural entities, heroic resistance, secret activities, intrepid adventures, visions of the future, progress and enlightenment. In theological accounts, legends of the Greek underworld, the Cretan Minotaur’s labyrinth and cavernous birthplace of Zeus preceded the grim myth of a Christian Hell. In Hindu and Buddhist cosmology, Patala, one of the three cosmic realms, is conversely imagined as a paradisical underworld with groves and lakes, suffused with sweet fragrance and music and inhabited by the Nagas, serpent gods. In the 14th century poem, The Divine Comedy, Dante must negotiate a path out of the hellish subterranean Inferno and away from the allegorical beasts that represent sinful self-indulgence, violence and maliciousness.

In later accounts, Hwang (2013: 2) notes that the 19th century opening up of the subterranean to visual scrutiny ‘led to an eruption of underground sensibilities that permeated linguistic, artistic and literary representations of the lower depths’. In Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice follows the White Rabbit down its rabbit hole to encounter a succession of fantastical and bizarre characters. Jules Verne’s 1871 science fiction novel, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, combines perilous masculinist escapades, spectacular underground scenery, scientific investigation and encounters with prehistoric creatures. Famous fictional denizens of the underground also include the post-human Morlocks, creatures that prey on the civilised Eloi above, in H. G. Wells’ 1895 dystopian novel The Time Machine and the trolls and dragons of Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954-1955), subsequently reimagined in Peter Jackson’s film series. Other fictional works tell of colonialist adventures in search of precious treasures (Scott, 2008).

Because of the frequent concealment discussed above, the subterranean realm ‘frequently re-emerges . . . as a site of ambivalent fascination’ (Billé, 2022: 146). For instance, adventure thrillers deploy underground settings to portray the ‘primal horror of entrapment, darkness, and suffocation’ (Crane and Fletcher, 2016: 17) and as a space utilised by outlaws, criminal gangs and masterminds, as well as subversive political groups. Key underground scenes in crime fiction explore urban injustices, harms, illicit practices and inequities and central characters that are typically ‘engulfed in a claustrophobic and frightening atmosphere where innocent victims are trapped, outsiders and deviants are banished, and secrets are buried’ (Cook, 2024: 744). Ian Cook discusses Ian Rankin’s novel Mortal Causes (1994), featuring his Edinburgh-based detective, John Rebus. Rebus discovers a body hanging from a (very real) butcher’s hook in a mediaeval alleyway in Mary King’s Place, now concealed beneath the city’s council chambers. Here, according to Cook (2024: 239), Rankin presents Edinburgh’s underground domain as ‘a dark and hidden place, holding secrets and shadows’. Strikingly, Mary King’s Close is a popular tourist attraction and is characteristic of those sites to which some visitors are drawn because of their literary associations (Çevik, 2020).

In children’s literature, representations of the subterranean veer away from such frightening and abject themes, instead depicting charming, cosy realms inhabited by anthropomorphic characters. Enid Blyton’s series of Mary Mouse books, popular with readers of the 1950s and 1960s, contain colourful illustrations of Mary’s homely underground habitat. Elsewhere, these stories have moved onto the screen. For instance, in the late 1960s and 1970s, Elizabeth Beresford’s novels about the eccentric, environmentally friendly, underground inhabitants of Wimbledon Common gained great popularity following the broadcast of the BBC’s stop-motion animated television series, The Wombles. Yet in adult films, the subterranean retains its purchase as a site for criminal degeneracy and supernatural malevolence. In the 1949 film, The Third Man, the Viennese sewers provide a spectacular location for a vivid chase scene, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) portrays a mine populated by villainous adherents of the Thugee cult, and in crime movie, Sicario (2015), a tunnel is used by a drug smuggling cartel to transport their wares from Mexico to US. More recently, in the television series Stranger Things (2016–2025), malignant creatures from an alternative underground universe, the ‘Upside Down’, exert a malevolent impact on the small US town of Hawkins.

Compelling stories are related in tourist literature and on guided tours, and at several subterranean sites, audio-visual screen extracts are viewed. Certain attractions offer dramaturgical productions that bear no relation to a site’s history. For example, the disused caverns and tunnels of a former slate mine at Braich Goch, Corris, Mid-Wales, are advertised as King Arthur’s Labyrinth, in which a costumed guide conducts visitors on a boat trip and walking tour. At certain points, a concoction of mythic stories about King Arthur from mediaeval Welsh texts, The Mabinogion and Book of Taliesin, are narrated and tableaux of animated figures are illuminated (Garrod and Dowell, 2020). Similarly, at the Smugglers Adventure attraction in St Clement’s Caves in Hastings, video displays and tableaux featuring the fictional character Hairy Jack are staged in parts of the extensive underground passages to conjure up the nefarious activities of 18th century smugglers (Smugglers Adventure, n.d).

Subterranean sensations

A third key element in tourist experiences of subterranean landscapes is how they are suffused with overwhelming, unusual and diverse sensations and affects that foreground their difference with the surface world. Recent social science thought has critiqued the predominance of the symbolic and the textual in influencing experience and calls for more attention to be paid to the ‘more than representational, haptic, performative, embodied, material and affectual qualities’ that shape an involvement with place’ (Kraftl and Adey, 2008: 214). The sensory turn in tourist studies chimes with this broader acknowledgement that feeling has been neglected at the expense of knowing and doing. Despite an enduring focus on the tourist gaze, tourism also offers an expanding range of tactile, sonic and olfactory experiences. While many highly managed, habitually apprehended tourist attractions reproduce predictable, comfortable sensations, other ventures promise more visceral, immersive and unexpected experiences, offering sensory alterity (Edensor, 2018).

Here the place-making potency of storytelling about underground landscape is revealed as partial, for it is supplemented by immersive, embodied experiences with often unfamiliar subterranean affordances, by the peculiar diversions that shape tourist sensory encounters, snaring their gaze, guiding their movements, conditioning what they hear and attuning them to sensory differences. They feel with subterranean textures and surfaces, see with light and shadows, hear with echoes and distant sounds (Edensor, 2022).

Cant (2003) explores the extraordinarily vivid sensual subterranean tourist practice of caving, depicted as an intimate, intensely immersive, strenuous encounter with darkness, mud and water, changing stony textures and sounds and fluctuating senses of confinement and spaciousness. While Cant’s evocative account captures an experience unfamiliar to most, more carefully regulated underground spaces also offer the potential to engage the senses otherwise, with labyrinthine pathways, contrasting areas of illumination and darkness, strange materialities and textures, peculiar visual perspectives and weird soundscapes.

Vision is reconfigured in many underground spaces. Given the prevailing darkness, only selective areas and objects are usually illuminated, as with elaborate dioramas and the spelaeological forms showcased in limestone caves. Elsewhere, thick gloom might blanket the route ahead, perhaps as visitors enter cavernous volumes and voids, provoking imaginative visions of that which cannot be seen. The normative focus of vision can also be reshaped by peculiar perspectives, unidentifiable infrastructures and views of the familiar world beheld from unusual positions. Certain awe-inspiring natural and industrial scenes might solicit a sense of the subterranean sublime (Williams, 2008) while the intricate designs and adornments of grottoes and labyrinths can delight the eye.

Subterranean soundscapes may defamiliarise habitual auditory apprehension. Distant echoes of indiscernible provenance, far away rumbles and the trickle or roar of invisible torrents might catch the ear of visitors. At other moments, silence is only disrupted by the sound of our own heartbeat and breath, and the footsteps and hushed tones of other visitors. Strange subsurface materialities stimulate a heightened tactile awareness. The hardness and porosity of limestone, marble, sandstone, coal, mud and earth might be supplemented by watery, gaseous, oily and organic substances. Impassive geological matter, Hawkins (2020) submits, can foreground a sense of earthly liveliness and the deep time through which subterranean materialities have emerged. The functional surfaces and apparatus of ergonomically designed military, industrial and transport infrastructures might provide a contrastingly clinical smoothness that has been imposed on the rough irregularity of underground space. Sudden gusts of wind surprise, humidity dampens skin and still air percolates breath, while bodies are cajoled into unfamiliar manoeuvres as they make their way along steep and winding paths.

We now discuss four sites in the UK that we have selected to give a broad sense of the diversity of subterranean tourist attractions. We reveal how the appeal of these sites chimes with the key themes identified above but also draws out their own idiosyncratic qualities, modes of presentation and range of experiences. We explore how these underground realms have diverse historical origins, were created in different eras for different purposes and have been developed as tourist attractions in distinctive ways and offer different stories and divergent sensations. We detail the key elements of the tours we undertook and the impressions we gained during in two cases, scheduled guided tours and in the other two examples, prolonged self-guided visits. During our visits we sought to mobilise a multisensory attunement through ‘attentive observation’, identified by Gandy (2024: 1387) as ‘a mode of perception that involves stopping, looking, and searching’ to register our own sensory experiences. In addition, we researched the stories related in guidebooks, historical accounts, academic interpretations and on websites.

Hellfire caves: Satanic practices, orgies and mythical chambers

The extensive chalk and flint tunnels in West Wycombe Park are popularly known as Hellfire Caves. Between 1750 and 1752, landowner and reformist MP, Sir Francis Dashwood, paid local workers to excavate the tunnels in an employment scheme created to alleviate poverty following poor harvests. Their design was possibly inspired by the Ancient Greek Eleusian Mysteries in which adherents entered tunnels, undertaking secret rituals devised to solicit psychic transformation and spiritual enlightenment. The tunnels would later become a critical venue for the unorthodox activities of the Hellfire Club.

What exactly took place in the caves has long been subject to conjecture, myth and sensationalist supposition. Details about the possibly libertine practices that occurred emerged from an account by John Wilkes, a radical journalist and politician, a former member of the club who was expelled for carrying out a dangerous prank. Lurid stories have been retold ever since. Dashwood was a key figure in a pleasure-seeking group originally called the Medmenhem Friars, subsequently designated as the Order of St Francis of Wycombe, and later called the Hellfire Club. Eminent and powerful politicians, poets, philosophers and professors numbered amongst the members. According to Lord (2010: 96), Hellfire clubs ‘represented an enduring fascination with the Devil and a continuing flirtation with danger and the unknown. . . [whose members] . . . were on a mission for excitement; they wanted sensual delights, sexual pleasure and an alternative to religion’. She considers that rather than being motivated by Satanism, theology or intellectual pursuit they were hedonistically inclined, ‘seeking to shock society, cause havoc and first and foremost, have a good time’. Dashwood’s branch of the club, it seems, regularly used the cave’s passages and chambers for bacchanalian exploits, blasphemous and subversive perversions of Christian ceremonies and orgiastic revelries. Myths persist about the participation in these festivities by women of uncertain identity, reputedly disguised as nuns. The truth is difficult to determine since members were sworn to secrecy, though their motto, ‘Do what thou wilt’, hints at libertine practices. Moreover, Paul Whitehead, a significant member, burned the club’s archives before his death so little historical record remains.

The caves were restored and opened as an independent tourist attraction in 1951. After paying the admission fee, we enter the portal via a turnstile and proceed down a gently sloping path. The sensory unfamiliarity is immediately all-enveloping and unsettling. The narrow passages are low in places and coerce our bodies to stoop while walking. White, blue and purple lights display the curving route ahead and highlight the plaster and flint textures of the walls (see Figure 1). Our disorientation is heightened at three junctures where the passage is briefly divided into two. About halfway, an entrance leads into the capacious Banqueting Hall, the venue for exclusive, lavish Hellfire Club feasts. In each of the hall’s four niches are later additions, replicas of classical statues. Exiting the hall, the path descends to cross a bridge over the ‘River Styx’, which flows through a channel adorned by artificial stalactites. In Greek myth, the river separated the real world from the underworld, and here it symbolically heralds the crossing into the Inner Temple. The river, the statues, the constricted passages, the sudden surprise of entering the chambers and the descent all exacerbate our perturbing but exhilarating sense of sensory disorientation. The serpentine passages, alcoves and chambers also resonate with the fantastical subterranean spaces in children’s literature.

Figure 1.

View down tunnel, Hellfire Caves.

The titillation incited by the underground tales of secret rituals, Christian mockery, classical reverence, copious drinking and furtive sex are amplified by various technologies. The walk through the tunnels is augmented by dramatically recorded narratives transmitted via a loudspeaker system and information boards that furnish historical details. These include accounts about the membership, activities and ethos of the Hellfire Club and the toil undertaken by workers. The most infamous spaces of merriment are represented as the Banqueting Hall, where the alcoves now occupied by statues were formerly reserved for members of the Hellfire Club as retreats for sexual encounter and the Inner Temple, site of the club’s most secret rituals. These scandalous histories are further theatricalised in six alcoves that contain tableaux comprising waxworks, some dating from the 1950s. Waxwork figures, described by Krawczyk-żywko (2018) as ‘one of the manifestations of the nineteenth-century fascination with the nascent cult and culture of celebrities’, continue to unsettle and amuse tourists through their uncanny verisimilitude to human figures. Groups of prominent club members dressed in wigs and period costume hover in mid-action, including Paul Whitehead (see Figure 2) and Francis Dashwood and his friend Benjamin Franklin. These possibly apocryphal tales about the transcendence of normative mores and morals have long intrigued tourists.

Figure 2.

Waxwork tableau of Paul Whitehead, Hellfire Caves.

Another key narrative and dramaturgical theme focuses on the uncanny. An information board provides details of two apparitions alleged to have been repeatedly encountered. One is the ghost of Paul Whitehead, which wanders the tunnels in an everlasting, fruitless search for his heart which was supposed to have been stored in an urn once secreted in the caves and subsequently stolen. The other is a lady in white who according to legend, was stoned to death by angry suitors. The ghostly theme is accentuated by another information board which tells of the filming and broadcast of TV programme, Most Haunted, in which ghost hunters spent the night in the caves and recorded a wealth of paranormal sounds and sights. The spookiness is further intensified by an information board which speculates about the presence of other secret tunnels, currently hidden and in the ghoulish faces carved into the walls of the Inner Temple. The visit ends in this same space with the recorded message: ‘Don’t get lost on the way out of you may have to spend the night here’, advice that is followed by sinister laughter. Further unearthly atmospheres are stoked during the annual Hallowe’en events. The 2025 offering involves costumed actors in the guise of ‘Live monsters creeping in the shadows and lurking in every corner’. The poster advertising the theme of the event entreats visitors to ‘Dare to descend deep into darkness’ to encounter ‘Toxic mutations. Nuclear nightmares’. The ‘spooky walk’ held for children promises ‘no jump scares’ and reinforces the way in which narration at the attraction subtly plays down aspects of the licentious activities that perhaps took place.

The combination of sensory disorientation, labyrinthine passages, theatrical waxworks, strange statues, salacious legends and spookiness make the Hellfire Caves a potent subterranean attraction.

Margate’s Shell Grotto: Beauty and mystery

From the 15th century, the inclusion of a grotto in landscaped gardens became popular, first in Italy, then France and subsequently across Europe. In 18th and 19th century England grottoes became a recurrent feature in large estates, and according to Monrós Gaspar (2024: 13), were ‘one of the many cultural products that outlines the everyday life of the Victorians’. They wildly varied in form and style. Poet Alexander Pope’s grotto at his Twickenham estate, created between the 1720s and 1740s, attracted intellectuals and wealth-holders to sample its mythical, visual and literary appeal. Initially influenced by classical and rustic designs, the grotto became a compendium of numerous geological specimens and symbolic meanings as Pope’s enthusiasms restlessly shifted, continuously seeking to stimulate the poetic imagination (Willson, 1998; Zhuang, 2022). Goldney’s Grotto in Bristol is adorned with a pillared hall, sculptures of lions, rare shells, faux stalactites and a local form of quartz, while the ceiling of the large Crystal Grotto at Painshill Park features shimmering crystalline stalactite forms. These artfully created underground realms, signifying the aesthetic and imaginative predilections of their creators, were readily converted into tourist sites. This was the case with the extraordinary Shell Grotto at Margate, discovered in 1835 by a resident of the house sited above it and opened as a tourist attraction in 1838.

With few of the illicit associations of Hellfire Caves, the Shell Grotto is less spooky but more mysterious (though a resident ghost, the Blue Lady, is said to haunt the Dome, while a séance took place in the Altar Room in 1939 (see Figure 3). The grotto resists logical explanation. The obvious interpretation, that it is an example of a Victorian folly, is contradicted by its location in a modest residential area of Margate, not to mention the lack of any historical record pertaining to its creation, despite the huge effort required to transport the millions of shells that adorn its interior that would presumably have been noticed by local inhabitants. This dearth of documentary evidence has generated much speculation. Marsh (2020) details how some accounts surmise that George Bowles, possibly a bricklayer, created the grotto. Others conjecture that the grotto was an 18th or 19th century folly created by wealthy individuals, although it seems likely that there would be a solid historical record of a structure designed to broadcast their status, as with other grottoes. Some suggest that the founder could have been a Captain Easter, who restored it as part of his pleasure garden sited adjacent to the grotto. Yet these speculations ignore that the site was never located on the property of a rich landowner while the patterns and symbols of the shells do not accord with 19th or 18th century designs.

Figure 3.

Séance, 1939, Margate Shell Grotto.

One striking claim is that the grotto was fabricated and inhabited by the Knights Templar, but this seems unlikely given that no obviously Christian symbols adorn its walls. Wilder speculations consider that the grotto is ancient and could have been wrought by Minoans, Aztecs, Mayans or Hindus or Romans – though once more, designs do not align with these styles. Some assert that it might have been the ritual centre of an obscure semi-Christian cult or little-known oriental sect, a haunt of witchcraft or a prehistoric astronomical calendrical structure (Turner, 2013). Marsh (2020) believes that the most plausible theory is that the grotto derives from ancient Phoenician culture. She maintains that the iconography bears striking similarities to Phoenician art and the journey through the cave symbolises the passage from birth to death and rebirth that accords with Phoenician cosmology, besides which she considers that they were possibly present in the area as traders and inhabitants.

Scientific approaches, carbon dating being the most obvious, have proved too expensive and understandings about the origins of the Grotto remain unsettled. Some cynically suggest that the reason that the owners have not pursued any scientific survey is less about cost than loss of the site’s main source of attraction and revenue: its unexplained status. To borrow a title of a user-generated video, would ‘unravelling the secrets’ of the grotto scientifically result in the unravelling of its hermeneutic puzzle? It is precisely its mysterious origins that add to the grotto’s allure

We enter the grotto from an adjacent shop. A chalk-lined tunnel, the North Passage, the only corridor without shells, leads to the circular passage of the Rotunda, then to the Dome in which a skylight admits natural light. The Dome is connected to the Serpentine Passage which leads to the end of the grotto at the rectangular Altar Chamber. About 4.6 million seashells adorn the ceilings and walls. With a background of small winkle shells embedded with shells of mussels, oysters, whelks and sea urchins (see Figure 4), they have been substantively restored (Turner, 2013). Discoloured by the gaslight that formerly illuminated the grotto, they are arranged into subtle patterns that incorporate geometric, architectural and organic motifs. These inscrutable, elaborate, swirling designs are captivatingly beautiful, and though some claim that they symbolically represent divinities, phalluses and trees of life, their exquisiteness is all-encompassing.

Figure 4.

Detail, Margate Shell Grotto.

Irrespective of any proposed symbolic meanings, the overarching impression of the grotto is shaped by its aesthetic and sensory qualities. This is explicitly recognised by the provision of a sensory map that marks out areas of sensory intensity, ensuring that there are no unpleasant surprises for neurodivergent visitors. The map charts ‘Busy Space’, denoting narrow spaces and the consequent potential for visitor crowding. ‘Dark Space’ signifies dimly lit and gloomy regions. ‘Smelly Space’ indicates areas in which the aroma of damp earth is pervasive. ‘Bright Space’ identifies the space of the dome in which daylight can seem dazzling in contrast to the crepuscular surroundings. The guide also warns that ‘the floor is steep and uneven and voices echo through the tunnels’. These designations augment our own powerful sensory experiences which are shaped by the beautiful ornamentation, ambling slowly through the narrow, curving passages and the enticing portals that link these tunnels (se Figure 5).

Figure 5.

Passage and portal, Margate Shell Grotto.

In his documentary film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Herzog (2010) visits the Chauvet Cave (location of the world’s second oldest cave paintings), where cutting-edge technology was used not only to carbon-date the paintings but to model the Cave in intricate detail using laser scanners. Every centimetre of the site was mapped three-dimensionally ‘to create an understanding of the cave, through that precision, through scientific methods’, as archaeologist Julien Monney explains. As exhaustive as the survey is, however, its million-plus data points can only take us so far; Monney continues: ‘the main goal is to create stories about what could have happened in that cave during the past’ (Herzog, 2010, emphasis added). Herzog nods, offering the analogy of the Manhattan phone directory with ‘four million precise entries’ that tell us nothing about their lives: ‘But do they dream? Do they cry at night? What are their hopes?’

Seeing Chauvet as the Shell Grotto’s figurative common ancestor helps to inscribe limits around the scientific interpretation of the site and allows its stories to proliferate. In the irreverent tour guide More Bollocks to Alton Towers, the Grotto is depicted as ‘gleefully maddening’ (Morris et al., 2007: 15). Whether it is ancient or merely Victorian, the wonder of the place is not to be found in precise accounts of its origin:

Who hasn’t brought back or been given a shell-encrusted knick-knack from the seaside? It could be a lost pagan shrine or have ‘A present from Margate’ picked out in the shells – it wouldn’t matter. It’s still magical, mysterious and (once it’s in your head) impossible to forget. (Morris et al., 2007)

Kitschy or antiquarian, the effect is the same. Descending into the grotto from the adjacent shop, the magic presents itself almost immediately. The modest materials, shells native to the British Isles, coalesce into something spectacular. The scale is breathtaking, the ornamentation overwhelming.

Charing Cross disused underground station: Transport infrastructure, sensory disorientation and movie location

London Underground has attracted tourists since numerous Victorian visitors came to gawp at the engineering achievements that created it. Today, the volatile, ever-expanding network is augmented by new lines and stations, while other sites become detached and obsolete. In recent years, a growing number of disused stations have been opened for commercial tours (Connor, 2021; Nix et al., 2019). Here, we focus on a 75-minute-long guided tour of the abandoned Jubilee Line station at Charing Cross. Opened to passengers in May 1979, the original plan was for the Jubilee Line to be extended through the city of London, passing under the Northern and Bakerloo lines above. However, this scheme was abandoned when it was decided that the line would instead go to Westminster and south of the river from Green Park. The Charing Cross Station thus became obsolete after only 20 years, closing in November 1999.

We enter a door in the large concourse of the Charing Cross complex, thrilled that we are entering a usually inaccessible realm and walk down the escalators that lead to the obsolescent, deeper Jubilee Line station. Here the guides explain the history of the station, its relation to the underground network and the plans that initiated its construction and its subsequent closure. Presently, the station is used as a site for training and testing new innovations, to accommodate the extra trains needed to transport passengers during large sporting events, and as a film location.

Old signs and maps have been retained to disclose the earlier connections and stations of the Jubilee Line, soliciting a feeling of being thrown back in time. The quiet of the tunnel provides a somewhat eerie contrast with the hubbub, announcements and rumble of trains in the lively tube stations above. Yet the abandoned station amplifies ‘the distant vibrations, allaying the slight breezes that pulse through the labyrinth’ (Mengham and Atkins, 2003: 199). Distant echoes, muffled noises and strange screeches punctuate the quiescence.

The tour includes two excursions into underground ‘backstages’. First, we enter a shiny door into a constricted, dark service tunnel, proceeding along a narrow, gridded walkway (see Figure 6). At one end, supplying the necessary fresh air to the underground system, is a huge ventilation shaft that extends several 100 m to Craven Street above. Flows of warm air assail our faces and faint sounds from the overground percolate down. Here, we are seeing London Underground from the perspective of the maintenance worker and engineer. At the other end of the tunnel is an opening through which we look down on a Northern Line platform as a train pulls into the station and passengers disembark and get on board. This peculiar perspective defamiliarises what for many London residents is an everyday, habitual practice in a familiar space.

Figure 6.

Pipes, service tunnel, Charing Cross disused Jubilee Line station.

The second excursion is also accessed through a door usually barred to public entry. We enter into a much longer, wider tunnel that was used in the original construction of the line and station in the late 1970s (see Figure 7). Given the dense urban setting of Charing Cross and the need to find a location that would not lead to disruption, a derelict site adjacent to the National Gallery – now occupied by the Sainsbury Wing – was chosen from which earth was removed and material transported underground. This purely functional channel, currently used for storage, is not furnished with plaster or shiny tiles but is characterised by griminess, dust, bare steel, rough plaster and brick. The curved iron girders that support the tunnel are adorned with embossed numbers and encrusted minerals and unidentifiable piles of mechanical parts, thin wiring and chunks of masonry are assembled. Texturally and spatially, the tunnel is deeply unfamiliar, and this is accentuated when we learn what lies above. At one juncture, the guides inform us, we are immediately underneath the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square; at another, we are standing below Nelson’s Column. At the end of the corridor is a 14-foot-thick concrete wall installed to prevent criminal access to the riches of the National Gallery. Besides the powerful sensory impressions and disorienting effects of our journey, we gain a renewed respect for the toil and technical expertise through which vast quantities of material and equipment were imported to construct this complex subterranean infrastructure of tunnels, rails, pipes, shafts and energy.

Figure 7.

Construction tunnel, Charing Cross disused Jubilee Line station.

A key feature of the tour are stories that tell of how the station has been used as a setting for cinematic fictions, constituting an example of the aforementioned popularity of tourist excursions to film locations (Connell, 2012). At first our attention is drawn to the sham advertising posters that line the station walls and corridors as part of movie sets. Ashford (2013) identifies the myriad fictional narratives and representations of the London Underground: it is portrayed as a space of modern boredom and alienation, geographical confusion, technological achievement, murder and criminality, dull urban routine, the uncanny and supernatural, romantic encounter, revolutionary and countercultural activity and shelter and refuge.

Pugliese (2020: 173) contends that the underground’s ‘subterranean, disorientating and labyrinthine nature make it the perfect setting for narratives that explore human fears’, and consequently, novelists and filmmakers feed on widespread urban legends and sensationalist news reports. She notes recent trends in horror and fantasy fiction in which passengers mistakenly leave trains at derelict stations and are trapped, confront deviant people, time-travel to an earlier age or enter a hellish domain of monstrous inhabitants. As Nix et al. (2019: 23) also claim, abandoned tube sites have been ‘the backdrop to a good deal of urban myth and speculation’, with filmmakers and authors reimagining them as ‘the home of ghosts, aliens and even flesh-eating troglodytes’. The Charing Cross Jubilee station has been a location for two notable horror films. In 28 Days Later (2002), the underground tunnels provide a safe passage in which to avoid the hordes of killer zombiesthat rampage through the overground city. In The Creep (2004; Dobraszczyk, 2015), the heroine is trapped in the station overnight and must confront the maniacs who hide here. However, on the family-friendly tour we undertook, these two films are not mentioned; instead, extracts from two popular adventure thrillers in which the Jubilee Line station is a location for action, escape and confrontation are played on a laptop.

In a 1-minute sequence from The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), the titular character, Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), descends into the crowded station via the escalators and by cunningly pretending to board a train just before the doors close, escapes from his pursuer who is fooled into getting on the departing train and exasperatedly looks out of the window from inside as he sees Bourne remaining on the platform.

The underground sequence in the James Bond film, Skyfall (2012), is much longer, at 7 minutes. Bond (Daniel Craig) lurks in the construction tunnel discussed above, as he searches for the villainous Silva (Javier Bardem) who descends the stairs into the Temple tube station – though in reality, the Charing Cross station. Bond subsequently jostles through a surging rush-hour crowd of commuters towards an arriving train, upon which Silva, disguised as a policeman, embarks while Bond leaps onto the train’s rear to gain entry. The camera repeatedly cuts between the two men as they make their way through the carriages in an urgent chase sequence. Both men disembark at the Embankment tube station - once more, the disused Charing Cross Station. The film’s most spectacular scene subsequently follows when Silva blows a hole in a ceiling that causes a train on a track above to plunge down towards Bond, narrowly missing the hero.

The unique design of the green and yellow tiling of the station is apparent in all the films we have mentioned, and later viewing offers the pleasures of recognition that this distinctiveness provides.

Drakelow tunnels: Cold war secrets

Hidden in plain sight for over half a century, the Drakelow Tunnels complex has a multi-layered history. Originally built as an underground World War II ‘shadow factory’ for the Rover car company to service the Midlands armaments industry, Drakelow subsequently had a second life in the Cold War era: as a Regional Seat of Government (RSG) in the 1960s and then as Regional Government Headquarters as part of Margaret Thatcher’s Home Defence Review (Stokes, 1996) The Tunnels were decommissioned and sold in 1993 (Drakelow Museum Museum: History, n.d). Today, in its third phase, the complex is privately owned and houses a bonded warehouse – a wine storage facility – together with an independent museum dedicated to the preservation of Drakelow’s history. The museum relies entirely on volunteers. It receives no funding, aside from some assistance with its electricity bill from the warehouse owners. Money raised from group and private tours and a limited range of souvenir merchandise forms the sole source of income, supporting the facilities’ restoration and upkeep (Drakelow Museum Museum: History, n.d). Prior to this, the Tunnels have hosted urban explorers, ghost hunters and paranormal investigators, paintball and airsoft gameplay, and emergency services training teams (Drakelow Museum Museum: About, n.d).

The entrance to the Tunnels has the appearance of a bricked-up mouth of a cave, complete with what we learn is a ‘triple blast’ painted metal door. Before entering, we are treated to a health and safety talk and told, under no circumstances, to take any photos. This is at the insistence of the warehouse owners, who are seeking to protect their insurance policy whilst continuing to allow public access to the site.

The tour guide turns out to be quite a comedian, with a dry, Black Country sense of humour. The strict ‘no photography’ rule is reinforced with a graphic description of what will happen to us should anyone contravene. Not only will we be taken outside and shot, we will also find ourselves slung in shallow graves. We all pledge not to die on this day and file in – all the time paying heed to the trip hazard warnings which appear as soon as we cross the threshold.

The group assembles in the first gallery before the tour officially starts; there is a palpable atmosphere of anticipation. We begin with an account of the construction of the Tunnels and the Ministry of Aircraft Production’s decision-making process around the selection of Drakelow as the site of a Rover shadow factory. Kidderminster, the nearest town, was the centre of the carpet industry and was deemed a safe place to locate a shadow factory. Again, the tour guide’s deadpan delivery adds to the picture: ‘Hitler didn’t hate carpets’, so Drakelow was the ideal site.

The cutting of the tunnels began in July 1941 and the complex was operational by November 1943 with production ending on 13 February 1946. Tunnel construction was achieved by a process of blasting and refining with pneumatic chisels (Stokes, 1996). We examine the evident chisel marks and there is much chatter about the scale of the place and the feat of physical labour that it took to excavate the three and a half miles of tunnels. Several visitors have direct links to those who either worked here in its heydey or since its decommissioning: one of the volunteers used to accompany his father to the Tunnels, who was also a volunteer in the 80s and 90s.

One of the few remaining fixtures from the shadow factory days is the Tannoy system, with its large, flared trumpet speakers. Apparently, these were used to pipe not only management announcements but music and even weather reports throughout the factory, as workers would not have any idea of what was happening above ground (Stokes, 1996).

As we move through the corridors and galleries, the visitor’s imagination is called upon to populate the museum, for the material culture is sparse, as are the archive images. We pause to watch a Pathe news film about shadow factories and an oral history video (Drakelow Tunnels World War Two Shadow Factory: A Worker’s Insight, 2015) that are projected onto the tunnel walls and which we, in turn, project into the vast corridors and caverns of the complex as we try to imagine working here. Farther along, we look at a handful of documentary photographs of the shadow factory in operation.

We make our way towards the dormitories, a feature of the Cold War life of the Tunnels. We learn that when the site was decommissioned, it was largely cleared out and the pieces of rusting equipment installed in the shadow factory galleries are donated from other museums. Likewise, fixtures, fittings and artefacts from the Cold War phase were, in the tour guide’s words, ‘tossed into skips, unused’. While some pieces were retained, most of the Tunnels’ contents were disposed of, leaving the museum empty of potential exhibits. The bedframes and mattresses that currently furnish the dormitories are relatively recent donations.

The authentication of the museum’s object collection is hazy. One decrepit piece of machinery is said to look ‘cool’ and therefore adds to the atmosphere rather than the precise history of the place, its function remaining enigmatic. Elsewhere, remnants of communications equipment line the walls, some stripped out by thieves, who have occasionally penetrated the complex, but their purpose is unexplained. Occasionally, there are recognisable objects. A couple of us joke about owning one of the computers in the office area and reminisce about the sound of daisywheel and dot matrix printers.

As we approach the canteen area, we witness a fully equipped industrial kitchen that was refurbished in the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher’s government revised its civil defence plans. Yet it has been left, almost entirely unused, to rust. On the wall are ration pack menus with austere, unappetising food items: luncheon meat, chicken in brown sauce, oatmeal block, green pea soup. This Cold War section of the complex was designed to house 140 government officials and formed one of 17 Regional Government Headquarters (Drakelow became known as R.G.H.Q.9.2.). The upgrade included a new communications system complete with a new BBC studio that formed part of its Wartime Broadcasting Service (Stokes, 1996).

Another refrain in the tour guide’s presentation emerges as we survey this section of the complex: of the irony inherent in Cold War waste that resonates with Baudrillard’s (1989: 31) comments on the ‘atrocious uselessness’ of the nuclear arms race: the stockpiling of ever more ‘refined and sophisticated weapons that do not lead to any war!’. The expense of the 1980s upgrade (reportedly, £2 million) is set against the derelict, rusting scene before us: the mouldering tea cannisters, colanders, kettles, commercial-sized food mixers, the baked potato oven. All soaking wet from the condensing damp, which beads on the stained stainless steel. But better this than it being put to use, stresses our guide.

The damp is epic, hanging from the ceiling like hard-boiled sweets or glass pebbles. Every so often, drops fall on our heads (‘this is why I wear a hat’, quips our guide). The Tunnels are excavated from porous red sandstone; changes in the water table after a spell of heavy rain mean that water periodically permeates the complex. During its operation as a shadow factory, dehumidifiers removed condensation at a rate of 2 l of water per minute. Today, the state-of-the-art dehumidifying system deployed by the wine business has not been extended to the museum; water pools on the floor and clings to every surface. The efforts of the museum’s volunteer staff seem Sisyphean in dealing with damp of this magnitude.

The extent of the decay certainly contributes to the apocalyptic atmosphere at Drakelow. In the final gallery that we can access, we view an extract from Protect and Survive, a public information campaign produced in the 1970s and listen to a radio announcement from the BBC’s Wartime Broadcasting Service (BBC, n.d.) that was intended to be broadcast in the event of a nuclear attack. At this point the atmosphere changes. Throughout the tour, good humour has prevailed with ghost noises being made at the mention of Yvette Fielding, for instance (an episode of the paranormal investigation show Most Haunted was filmed at Drakelow). Watching government instructions on how to dispose of bodies in shallow graves generates grimmer laughter to that induced by our guide earlier. It becomes evident that above-ground politics are seeping into the Tunnels along with the damp. Mutterings of Putin and Ukraine are audible as we watch the films. The air of knowingness that removing interior doors to form a bomb shelter is a futile act is tempered with a sense of unease.

In Rings of Saturn (Sebald, 2020: 237), W.G. Sebald visits Orford Ness, also a former Cold War site and imagines himself ‘amidst the remains of our own civilization after its extinction in some future catastrophe’, and like us on our tour, as he wanders among enigmatic ‘heaps of scrap metal and defunct machinery’, there is a mood of having survived the catastrophe, at least, of having lived through the end of the world to bear witness to its ruins. At Drakelow, in 2025, with contemporary international tension heating up, it seems that many of us know that we are not yet beyond the days of Protect and Survive. Half-joking, some of us pledge to meet here if things go to hell and we get enough warning.

Conclusion

In this paper we have explored the enduring fascination amongst tourists for underground realms, which as we have exemplified, vary in scale and diversity. As such, we have sought to fill a gap in the literature, first, by identifying three key distinctive pleasures that prevail at many subterranean sites, namely the thrill of access to once forbidden sites, the rich stories that circulate around them, and unfamiliar sensations that are experienced. These three factors meld together to stoke the tourist encounter with the subsurface. We have underpinned this allure by focussing on four very different underground tourist attractions, researching their histories and undertaking guided and unguided tours.

We suggest that the once secretive, forbidden use of many underground sites that made them inaccessible is a significant factor in attracting tourists once they are converted into attractions. At the Hellfire Caves, the obscure anti-Christian, licentious, drunken, erotic practices and rituals once staged here stoke tourist imaginations. The Shell Grotto was discovered nearly two centuries ago as a mysterious subterranean space and retains its mystery. A tour around Charing Cross disused Jubilee line station discloses usually unseen infrastructural facilities established to enable its construction and sustain flows of air and energy, while a visit to Drakelow Tunnels involves entry into a formerly clandestine world of military production as a shadow factory and later, as a Cold War nuclear bunker known only to a select few, part of a secret state infrastructure in the event of nuclear war. At all sites, the extensive labour involved in the creation of these subterranean environments is impressive.

We draw attention to the copious literature and filmic and televisual representations that for centuries have fictionalised and historically accounted for subsurface domains. These inspire visits and are often deployed in guide narratives and audio-visual presentations. The Hellfire Caves present the lurid historic activities that took place through dramatised recorded commentary and information boards, supplemented by the waxwork tableaux that add to the theatrical atmosphere. The mystery of the origins of the Shell Grotto constitutes the central focus of the site’s narration in guidebooks and informational panels, with visitors considering the plausibility of the many conjectural stories. Charing Cross Jubilee line station has been a film location in which action sequences staged in major cinematic blockbusters are played on screen on the tour, while lower budget horror movies have also used the site as a setting for their dramas. The guide’s commentary at Drakelow Tunnels details the various stages of the site’s uses, showing video clips to fuel imaginary historical recoupings and memories. Ghosts and supernatural elements are conjured up at all sites, with both Hellfire Caves and Drakelow Tunnels having staged an episode of television programme, Britain’s most Haunted.

Finally, we insist that underground realms are suffused with a diverse array of unfamiliar, often powerful sensations that diverge from those experienced above ground. The beautiful, intricate designs of Margate’s Shell Grotto lure the scrutiny of the tourist gaze and the grotto’s multisensorial qualities are foregrounded in the sensory map provided that indicates areas of special and specific sensory intensity. In Hellfire Caves, the murky chambers, strange waxwork figures, winding tunnels and River Styx add to the echoing footsteps, inaudible commentary ahead, rough textures and coloured illumination to produce an exceedingly unfamiliar sensory atmosphere. In Charing Cross’s disused tube station, blackened service tunnels replete with odd fixtures, forms and textures, sudden gusts of wind, distant rumbles and distinctive colours offer potent sensory stimulations. A tour along Drakelow Tunnels also provides weird sensations, with its pervasive damp, unidentifiable equipment and ruinous kitchen.

We contend that the three key allurements shared by most subterranean tourist sites are salient points of connexion and possess explanatory power. Yet our four examples also show that there is no definitive, singular or universal ‘underground’ experience, nor any archetypal destination, in the same way that Bowman and Pezzullo (2009) argue that the overarching label ‘dark tourism’, while useful categorically, cannot capture the diversity of dark tourist sites, motivations, productions and experiences. Each of our sites reveal that underground tourist attractions have their own peculiar cultural resonances, historical specificities, treasury of stories and rich sensory attributes. We hope that we might stimulate further research into many more distinctive subterranean tourist spaces.