I love visiting underground places. Some of the most notable ones I have visited are:
- Disused coal mine in Wales, United Kingdom, open as a museum; you wear a hard hat and lamp, like the miners did, and go down in the lift shaft; and you're encouraged to turn the lights off to see what pitch black is really like. I went when I was six years old, and again more recently.
- The "Catacombs" in Paris: burial chambers, full of stacked skulls and bones.
- The Shanghai Tunnels in Portland, Oregon, in which people were "Shanghaied" (kidnapped) to work on the sea. This was done by using a pretty woman to lure them to stand above a trapdoor in the bar above, which would open, and send them hurtling into the depths.
- The "Secret Nuclear Bunker" in England: an underground government headquarters built in case of a nuclear attack. It is a time warp of 1980s equipment.
- Wartime tunnels in the white cliffs of Dover.
On the London Underground, I have been in a train cab, and seen what it looks like from the driver's view. It's very different from what you see as a passenger: the tunnels are extremely dark and narrow (on many lines, the train only just fits inside them), unlike the brightly lit stations and trains. That's often a thing about public underground places: when they're brightly lit, they don't
feel underground. There a photo of the Queen in the Bank of England vault, surrounded by gold bars, and again, it's brightly lit; not how you might imagine an underground bank vault to be. There's also a bar in the City of London which is a former bank, and in the basement, you can see the actual vaults and heavy doors. Someone I know walked inside the Channel Tunnel linking England and France before it started running.
I'd love to go down storm drains, sewers; and London is full of underground rivers which have been built over.
@superlittle04 Where in Wales is that crane and mine shaft?
