THE GREATEST MYSTERY OF THEM ALL
Delve into the Williamson Tunnels and ask the question every visitor does: why?
EAST OF THE city centre, at Edge Hill, you’ll find the Williamson Tunnels Heritage Centre, home to what might be the most mysterious abandonment in all of England.
Joseph Williamson (1769-1840) was a prosperous tobacco merchant. In 1805 he bought an undeveloped outcrop of sandstone at Edge Hill and began to build houses on it. He swiftly developed a reputation as an eccentric. As a builder, he would create higgledy-piggledy homes to bizarre specifications, and bolt them onto each other with little thought for logic or firm foundations. Middle floors would often connect to completely different dwellings from the floors above and below them.
As a landlord, he was equally strange. When one tenant complained of a lack of space for her expanding family, he blasted a hole through her drawing room wall and gave her a room in the house next door, suggesting it would make a fine nursery.
But his most curious interest lay in tunnelling. Or rather, not strictly tunnelling but enclosing former quarries beneath Edge Hill with brick walls and high ceilings, creating a network of massive subterranean vaults with no apparent purpose.
His obsession got noticed. People used to call Williamson ‘the King of Edge Hill’. From this point, he became ‘the Mole of Edge Hill’.
In the early 1830s, the famed engineer Robert Stephenson was busy building a railway tunnel through Edge Hill. One day his labourers were startled when Williamson’s navvies burst through one of their walls. Stephenson’s men fled, believing they had arrived in the Underworld and disturbed Satan’s minions. When Stephenson himself came down to investigate, Williamson explained they had just ‘dropped by’ to ‘show them how to dig tunnels’.
Williamson never wrote or spoke of the purpose of his tunnels. Wild theories abound, although simple philanthropism – providing paid labour to a deprived community – is the most likely explanation.
In the century following his death, his bizarre houses were removed (apart from his own home, now a scheduled but derelict monument) and the tunnels filled in with rubble, fading from sight and public consciousness. Only in the 1990s were they rediscovered. Since then, the volunteers of the Joseph Williamson Society have worked tirelessly to excavate the tunnels and make them publicly accessible. You can now enter via the Heritage Centre and explore four of the main chambers, and see the fascinating finds that came from them ( inset). It’s an extraordinary labyrinth of vaulted ceilings and interconnecting chambers; sometimes the cellars of buildings above are clearly visible in the gaps between the stonework. But don’t expect English Heritage-style creature comfort: it’s a live site run by volunteers, so you’ll be walking on wobbly scaffolds and hopping across planks and boulders over the sodden chamber floors. “In recent years it has become fashionable to suggest they were part of some apocalyptic cult or alien invasion,” says society founder member David Bridson.
“Doctor Who suggested that just last year, which suddenly brought us a whole lot more attention. But I think the facts of the story are far more inspiring and interesting.
I think you’ve just got a good man, helping people and creating something absolutely unique that he hoped would outlast him.”
Admission to the tunnels costs £5 for adults, £3 for children, £4 concessions or £15 for families. Find full details, including opening times, at williamsontunnels.co.uk