An enormous hole in the ground near where I live in London could become the British capital’s next great tourist attraction. Ever since Bloomberg News wrote about it in September, I’ve followed the progress of what’s been nicknamed the “James Bond tunnel.” In October, I attended a presentation inviting neighborhood comment on a £220 million ($280 million) plan to transform the Kingsway Telephone Exchange, which lies underneath High Holborn street and was built as a World War II air raid shelter. It also served as a secret workspace for Winston Churchill’s spy agency, then as a conduit for the Moscow-Washington hotline during the Cold War before becoming a major switching station for British Telecom, the UK’s state-operated phone company. Now called BT Group Plc, it declared Kingsway defunct in the 1990s and put it on sale in 2008.
If London Tunnels Ltd. wins all the necessary approvals, the structure — two large parallel tunnels linked by smaller passages — will become a subterranean multimedia “immersive experience” taking visitors through all that history. It will also house the deepest cocktail bar in London, where presumably your martinis will be shaken, not stirred — perhaps by the tube’s Central Line which runs between the two tunnels.
As with many urban projects, local authorities have the final say. But the new Kingsway — which will be reimagined by Wilkinson Eyre Ltd., the design firm behind the £9 billion shopping-mall overhaul of Battersea Power Station — is halfway there. Last week, the council of the City of London approved the project. Now, the developer needs the consent of the adjoining council of Camden to start work. That could come in July. If anything, refurbishing the building alone that serves as the tunnel’s air intake valve on an alley off Holborn will improve the streetscape tremendously.
There’s been another World War II-era revamp in London. At about the same time Kingsway was announced, Raffles Hotels & Resorts opened its rejuvenation of the historic Old War Office, rebranded OWO to soften the association with military conflicts. Wealthy guests can book the late prime minister’s Whitehall work space — the Army Council Room, lavishly redecorated as a luxury suite — for $25,000 a night. Meantime, the Admiralty Arch that opens to the Mall (which then leads on to Buckingham Palace) will become a Waldorf Astoria hotel in 2025.
The British Empire has had a relatively soft landing compared to other imperial enterprises. Still, Britons nostalgic for old glories may wince at these consumerist reincarnations of the past. But it’s better than razing sites that have outlived their usefulness. Today, the National Trust makes money by renting out historic cottages to vacationers. For the literary-minded who’d rather not wander along London metro lines, I’ve got another historic tunnel for you: Alexander Pope’s Thames-on-Twickenham grotto — all that remains of his famous garden — is now open to the public on selected days.
So why not turn old symbols of British hard power into seductive embodiments of soft power? The Hinduja Group paid £350 million in 2016 for the Old War Office, shoveling in £1 billion more to transform it into the 120-room Raffles London. Private residences in the building are also available, with one-bedroom apartments starting at about £4 million. It’s a profitable way to achieve the important task of preserving the past — as Rudyard Kipling wrote, “Lest we forget — lest we forget.”
Kipling, of course, foresaw the decline of empire in the poem from which that line is taken. He wrote “Recessional” in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, as much an apex of British global power as any. “Far-called, our navies melt away,” he wrote, “On dune and headland sinks the fire:/ Lo, all our pomp of yesterday/ Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!” Kipling probably wouldn’t have been too surprised by the slow transformation of London’s imperial icons. After all, Rome didn’t fall in a day; it’s taken a while to turn it into a metropolis of Airbnb rentals.
Of course, sybarites are not really out to learn from the past; they just want to bask in its prestigious shadows. Those who forget history should at the very least pay a premium for sleeping with it.
Credit: Bloomberg
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