GOING UNDERGROUND

I wrote this dissertation last year as part of the BArch course. If you would like to read a copy please email me.

Abstract

Deep beneath the city streets of Manchester lies a network of reinforced concrete tunnels known as the ‘Guardian’ Underground Telephone Exchange.

Today, this ageing relic of the Cold War operates silently as a piece of infrastructure facilitating the lives of the urbanites above. Little information regarding the ‘Guardian’ is readily accessible and the subversive nature of the structure acts to entomb the reality of the network’s operation. A lack of information allows facts to be replaced by myths, fostering numerous perceptions of the same intangible space.

The ‘Guardian’ Underground Telephone Exchange was constructed during a time of escalating international tensions as a ‘hardened’ bunker to protect vital communication links in the event of a nuclear attack upon Manchester. However, this defining characteristic of protection was lost as advances in bomb technology rendered the tunnels redundant. The bombproof tunnels still exist but the condition of nuclear confrontation does not. This dissertation focuses on how perceptions of the redundant, hidden spaces change through time by: looking at the people that seek to explore abandoned buildings in the city, the public who may not even know of the systems existence and comparisons of similar wartime architecture alongside the effect that the invention of the ‘bomb’ had across the wider discipline of Urban Design.