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The city of Znojmo in Czech Republic has 4 levels of catacombs and underground passages, 27 km in length:

https://znojmoregion.cz/cs/znojemske-podzemi-znojmo# (switch language to English)

Reading (the largest town in the UK btw) has other tunnels … for example https://www.readingchronicle.co.uk/news/14492484.sneak-a-pea... and there is a rumour of secret escape tunnels from the (medieval) abbey.

lol, might be like trying to get the doors between adjacent hotel rooms open with strangers.

> convince random neighbours across the street to open their access doors

Would definitely work with kids. if there were a bunch of 10yo kids there would definitely be an underground kids mischief network.

Underground kiez would kill in Berlin

Don't miss the linked video tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Vj6FZZc4SE

I claim 1% commission if anyone on HN buys it

Has the potential for an "EMP resistant server farm"? Is that a common thing that realtors need to find for their clients?

Relatively secluded and private, Seymour Cray was also a tunneler... he wouldn't have been making videos about it

The story about him in Time at the time: https://web.archive.org/web/20080521163217/http://www.time.c...

    For Cray, the excavation project is more than a simple diversion. "I work when I'm at home," he recently told a visiting scientist. "I work for three hours, and then I get stumped, and I'm not making progress. So I quit, and I go and work in the tunnel. It takes me an hour or so to dig four inches and put in the 4-by-4s. Now, as you can see, I'm up in the Wisconsin woods, and there are elves in the woods. So when they see me leave, they come into my office and solve all the problems I'm having. Then I go back up and work some more."

I wasn't impressed by the 15 metres, but it turns out that is the maximum depth reached, not the length of a tunnel.

Yeah, I though it was 15 meters of length, not that impressive... but it is 15m underground and '... 1,300 square feet of underground space, including tunnels and storage rooms'.

not 15 million tunnels :D

That traditionally would be described as “a maze of twisty little passages, all alike”

If you’re instead interested in a book about a house with 15 million tunnels, read House of Leaves!

And if interested in underground in general, I can recommend Underland by Robert Macfarlane.

Thank you. I definitely read this as million.

I read it as 15 million tunnels too, was very confused. Thank you!

That is still an impressive water table. I wish ours was that low :-)

The most important comment on this article.

oops … sorry … now fixed

Homes need more whimsey. I recently discovered one of my interior doorways is actually a stone archway that someone had squared off, drywalled and installed a cheap hollow door for no apparent reason. Working with a stonemason to re-point/parge it and bring it back to glory. Will I ever see a return on this investment? Probably not but fuck it it'll make my house just that much cooler.

If I had 6 children, I would probably take up tunnelling.

I can't quite put my finger on it, but there's something... odd about her approach.

The OG tunnel influencer is, of course, Colin Furze: https://www.youtube.com/@colinfurze

I've been following her since the beginning. I'm really skeptical 4 years later whether or not it's real at this point because it feels like it's pretty dangerous and expensive and I find it hard to believe she got the permitting necessary to keep digging below the house like that. But I still follow her.

The weird part is her onlyfans-style alternate account which is kind of strange...

That’s one big arugula!

aol wtf

As far as I can tell, the actual house is missing. This is the outbuildings and tunnels and associated non-dwelling rooms only, and planning permission exists to build a house on this land. I suspect you won't get planning permission to use what is there as a house, but instead are required to replace this with a house according to the approved plans.

Perhaps they split the previous house out into its own plot and sold it separately.

Auction pricing.

It'll start out at £300k (to market it attractively) and end up selling for £500k+.

Check the pictures, this doesn't look like a house to me. 2 levels of workshop areas and an office area. Also the swimming pool is in the front yard, thats a weird one.

UK money. Still that works out to about $400k in us dollars. You can find better deals in the US, but probably none with tunnels - and unlikely to be places you want to live though not bad places (bad places in the US that would be around $120k)

It does seem cheap for a house in Reading, even factoring in that it is a bungalow. Maybe they factored in increased subsidence risk?

There's a bunch of potentially unpermitted tunnels under the property. Quite the liability.

Suspiciously cheap. There are no detached (what we call 'freestanding') properties on Right Move in the area under £400k. The cheapest is £450k

EDIT: oops, forgot to select the 'Bungalow' filter too (ugh). 2 properties: £375k and £350k (very small, 60m2). Still...nothing detached around £300k

EDIT2: ohh auction...230m2...yeh won't go for £300k, way more

That's because London is on clay. The Reading guy was mostly on chalk (and was himself an engineer). It sounds like the water table was a long way down as well. Soft clay or waterlogged sand are more like digging a hole in a bowl of custard. There are a lot of things that can go wrong - in the case of clay, even if you don't collapse the hole the clay can expand for years afterwards ("heave").

Doing underground expansion correctly won’t cause streets to sink.

The title is "not even" clickbait, just very confusing.

"The unique complex contains more than 1,300 square feet of underground space, including tunnels and storage rooms - and even a hand-built railway."

(Edit: I mean the original article, not the submission)

sorry for the capital M … I have fixed in the title to 15m as in metres

that’s ~ 45 ft underground, I believe … perhaps not that impressive, but quite funny since I would hesitate to undermine my own house and surely this makes it worth less

> Curious how he got planning permission. Or if he got planning permission.

The answer lies in your first sentence:

> 300k in Tilehurst for a house with a pool is incredibly cheap.

My hunch: Sound-deadening baffles.

Is that an issue in the UK?

>1,300 square feet of underground space, including tunnels and storage rooms - and even a hand-built railway.

Says it’s vacant. Says guy started in the 80s. Going to deduce he is/was older and moving on for any number of normal reasons. Why is the reason so important?

Looking at the pictures, my best guess is that the maintenance has been an issue for some time.

I don’t think it extends beyond property limits.

By all means, show us the endless network of cavernous tunnels you've hand-dug under your own home, then.

Depth, not length

15 metres? Given that your average two storey house is much less than 10m tall in total I wouldn't say 15m is "nothing".

This is the listing. You can click through pictures of it all. The rocket entrance is amazing.

https://www.btgeddisonspropertyauctions.com/properties/20260...

That was my first thought. Then I wondered why it was talking about Reading rather than Lincolnshire.

You'd probably be interested in this person's work: https://youtu.be/6CLF4QrYmYg

The online versions of local British Newspapers are almost unreadable now with all the chumbox ads and continual page repainting. Ugh.

Fans of Wind Rose (the band) maybe?