Real Estate for Aspies, Any Bids?

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LONDON — For sale: a vast tunnel complex in central London. Former tenants include Britain’s secret service, the famous hot line between America and the Soviet Union during the cold war and 400 tons of government documents. The asking price is $7.4 million.

Though some may fantasize about buying the space and living a secret life in a cavernous underground world filled with gadgets suitable for the Bat Cave, the reality would most likely be harsher.

The air is dry, hot and stale. The constant rattling of London Underground trains rushing through a separate tunnel system a few feet above and the sound of giant ventilation fans make the tunnels a noisy environment.

From the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/28/busin ... ted=1&_r=1

Hell, alot of us alreghty live in substantial seclusion, if anything this is our chance to form an underground society.


Now how many of us would it take pitched in to afford this underground dry hot and stale paradise?

I wonder if all that is real...
Who is going to leave in an underground cave where there were secret documents about the cold War ?

The caption for the first photo on that article says: "David Hembra of the BT Group, Britain’s largest phone company, in one of the secret tunnels built during World War II as bomb shelters for London residents."

Rings true to me.

The phone company (or at least it's state-owned earlier incarnation - it was privatised and is now a totally commercial venture) also built a network of tunnels in Manchester. My apartment there was built in the 1940s and the cellars underneath our apartment blocks were also built to function as bomb shelters. And they were also connected to a similar network of tunnels that ran underneath Manchester. There still is such a network of tunnels in Manchester. Our housing estate got cut off from the rest of the network when they built a huge arterial road in the 1960s, and all foundations and the 'cutting' for the road destroyed the link between our cellars and the rest of the network.

Part of the network of tunnels that still exists in Manchester houses a telephone exchange, so it's still used by the telephone company.

http://www.cybertrn.demon.co.uk/guardian/
http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/ ... es_to_life

[p.s. I spend time in both Manchester (where I have an apartment) and Doha (where I work).]

I wonder how expensive it would be to run AC?

Cool! I always wanted my own bunker

I want. I really want.

i would put a bet but i wonder what the shipping charges are

A random thought loosely related to my initial post: I remember reading the book, "The Mole People," by Jennifer Toth about different groups of people living underneath Manhattan. One group were described as living on cliff overlooking the Harlem River as it runs under Manhattan who had been underground for so long they began communicating by chirping. Also, according to the author, at the time the book was written, 18,000 people living in the NYC underworld. Sections of the book have been since discredited, but other parts are mostly verifiable. I always found this sort of thing fascinating.