Question - BT Tunnells Liverpool City Centre

[Liverpolitan]

Does anyone have any information on the BT tunnels in Liverpool. They are supposed to run from Lancaster House in old hall street, and are over 30m deep. There are access points in back Leeds street( r/o BT Liverpool HQ) and a large lift shaft on the corner of Vauxhall road and Leeds street.
I have been told by Local people from the Vauxhall Road area that they were built in Ww2 and later expanded. ( The speaking clock was kept there in Ww2)
The tunnells are still in use because Open reach vehicles are regularly in attendance at the lift shaft, but I am unable to find any information of them or mention of the 3 storey lift shaft which has no signage on it at all.53°24'47"N 2°59'22"W · 20.3 m google earth.

 

[Lord Oort]

All im gonna say is good luck with that one.

 

[westernsultan]

There is an interesting article at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5192505/Documents-reveal-tunnels-hidden-UK-streets.html showing that the details you need may have been released by The Land Registry for public use. The map for Birmingham is included in the article

 

[Speed]

Most large citys have a deep level BT network of some description. Unfortunately BT invested alot in thier security so not only are they hard to get in once your in they are full of motion sensing cameras so they are a bit of a suicide mission for what is basically just a fairly modern tunnel with cables in it. Maybe the ones in liverpool made use of existing tunnels but usually they date from the 50s cold war ear not ww2.

 

[Seffy]

Got excited at first - thought some crazy mofo had actually managed them!

 

[wormster]

^^ what he said

 

[Seffy]

If I remember correctly some lads got down an air vent stack a few years ago and were caught and arrested.
BT do have their own alarm monitoring system.

They do - not sure how reliable it is though. I can fully imagine however, that if you were to be caught down the vent shaft, you would be arrested

 

[bikebouy]

Near the roundabout on Vauxhall rd is a memorial to all the people who died in a german bomb hitting their air raid shelter , so possibly the GPO re purposed these tunnels for a cable run.

 

[Xan_Asmodi]

My ex's dad used to work in BT Liverpool from the 70s through to 2019. He was involved in infrastructure planning buildout, so knows about the tunnels. They do indeed run from Lancaster House up to St Anne's Street, but they are just underground cable runs. They were built to make it easier just to run cables outside of the immediate business district of the city centre.

One interesting thing that I found out through him is that since the amount of water being extracted from the water table around Liverpool has decreased in the last 30/40 years, a few BT employees almost came unstuck at the bottom of the tunnel. When the lift was descending, the water slowly started rising up their bodies until they were approximately chest or neck deep. They didn't realise that the water table had risen and apparently water had infiltrated the lift shaft. Now they have pumps and they have to send the lift down empty and bring it back up again to check whether the water is too high

 

[bikebouy]

Tate and Lyle and the Power statin that was on the dock rd took huge amounts of water every day from the water table, when both closed the water table rose quite a bit requiring British Rail to increase pumping on the Loop and northern lines of Merseyrail.