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Secret London Tunnel for Sale

The New York Times and the BBC [^] have a story about one mile of secret London Tunnels [^] for sale. The tunnel is expected to change hands for somewhere around the £5m mark.  The tunnel, 30m below the streets, was last put on the market in 1996 and failed to attract a buyer.

London Tunnel

Photo Credit: Steve Forrest for The New York Times [^]

The tunnel was built during World War 2 for use as an air raid shelter for 8,000 people, along with 7 other tunnels. This tunnel was never used by the public and remained a secret.  The Allies used the tunnel to co-ordinate and support the anti-Nazi resistance movements operating in mainland Europe.

After the war the tunnel was used by the Post Office as part of the Washington-Moscow hotline which was established after the Cuban missile crisis.

Plans for a secret central London hideaway are going to be disturbed by a tube line running a few feet above the tunnel, and the need for noisy ventilation fans. Access to the tunnel is by the two lifts, one close to Chancery Lane and the Royal Courts of Justice.

More Photos: BBC Historic Picture Gallery [^].

Teddy Killers

High-speed photography is an amazing thing.  Milk splashes and rain drops, are the usual fare.  This time someone has stepped over the line, and used their powers for evil instead of advertising; they shot a teddy bear.

bear shot

Image: Dan Tobin Smith for Kilimanjaro

Kilimanjaro magazine Olu Odukoya founder says, “Seeing things exploding isn’t particularly rare, but seeing a teddy bear exploding evokes an emotional response.”  Our response is: “Cool!”  Especially once we had seen the “making of” video.

School Memories: Free-Ranging Home.

I have just read a blog post with a lovely photo of the Radnor Street Cemetery, in Swindon [^], that brought make a few memories.

This is a photo of the cemetery that I found, available for public use under the Attribution, Share Alike Creative Commons Licence by Brian Robert Marshall, showing what a good view the cemetery offers of the town centre.

radnor str cemetery

Image Credit:  Brian Robert Marshall, under this CC Licence.

For a while, the Radnor Str Cemetery was one of our regular detours on the way home from school, back when free-ranging kids were the norm [^] rather than the exception. 

I don’t know why we went through here, it was definitely an out of the way route compared to the our usual walk down Clifton Street.  I think that it was a bit of a thrill, all those creepy gravestones, and the risk of being locked in.  And for some reason I can only remember going through there in the winter months, probably for the extra creepiness!  But then again perhaps that is just my memory playing tricks on me.

Thank you June for the story, the Hidden Swindon blog [^], and for bringing back this almost forgotten memory.  More information can be found on the Blunsdon Parish Council webpage about the cemetery [^], and there are more black & white photos [^] on the BBC Wiltshire site.

No Bananas (Left) Today

There are a lot of niche blogs out there.  But I don’t think that I have found a more focused blog than this – London Bananas [^].

london bananas

All it is is photos of banana skins left in public places, so “Yes, We Have No Bananas Today[^].  Sadly there doesn’t appear to be a RSS feed on the site, so I donlt know that I will be checking-back too often.

Photo Credit:  London Bananas [^]

Classic Photo Redux

Here at BrizBunny we vear dangerously between the macabre and the sublime. 

Today I stumbled across these Lego revisits of classic photos by Mike Stimpson (Flickr User Balakov [^]).  With the Olympics being in China right now this twist on Jeff Widener’s “The unknown rebel” from 1989 seemed appropriate.

Tiananmen Square - the lone rebel

Tiananmen Square - The unknown rebel

This is no one-off there is a massive collection of these painstakingly recreated photos, check them out on flickr [^].

Photo Credit: “Tiananmen Square” – Flickr User Balakov [^]
Original Photo: “The unknown rebel” [^] Jeff Widener.