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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/_denydefenddepose on 2025-05-27 00:07:32+00:00.
Most people know the UK city of Liverpool for The Beatles, their three football teams (including Tranmere Rovers) and having an accent that can be nearly incomprehensible to outsiders. Almost no one knows Liverpool as the site of one of the largest, most impressive, mysterious and bizarre complexes of underground tunnels in the world - but it is.
Edge Hill is an unassuming and somewhat deprived area sitting on the eastern edge of the city. Once home to the first intercity railway in the UK and a thriving, wealthy merchant population, it is now full of student flats, abandoned factories and tyre yards. Even the university bearing its name has long fled 13 miles north to Ormskirk. But in the 1800s, Edge Hill was a desirable area, away from the pollution of the Industrial Revolution, allowing the elite to look down upon the city that was building their wealth. One of the people responsible for this was the person who built these tunnels - Joseph Williamson. It’s also home to obsessive groups of people fighting - often with each other - to understand who he was, why he built these tunnels, and just how many more of them are there, waiting underground to be discovered.
Disclaimer - I am not involved with any of the groups I’ve written about here, although I have entertained thoughts of signing up but I don’t think it would work - many of them are of retirement age and have much more time on their hands than me. I’m just someone who loves underground structures, went on a few of the tours, chatted to the volunteers and became obsessed with the tunnels, the story, and the strange, dedicated people who are trying to bring them to public attention. I think this sort of story is like a moth to a flame for a very particular kind of weirdo, and I recently learned that I am definitely that type. As many of those types exist on this subreddit, you might be too.
Who was Joseph Williamson?
This is hard to answer. Wiliamson was a secretive and deeply weird man, and not even the competing groups of volunteers dedicated to his legacy can properly agree on his history. He didn’t like writing things down, and only a letter or two of his exist, none of them containing anything particularly interesting. Born in Warrington (probably) to a family down on their luck, he was likely sent to Liverpool with a letter of recommendation to work for a wealthy tobacco and snuff merchant called Richard Tate. Joseph buckled down and worked hard, married the boss’s daughter Elizabeth when the old man died and bought the business from Richard’s failson, Thomas. He then grew the business considerably, incorporating it into his own company Leigh & Williamson.
Williamson and his wife decided to get out of the big smoke and move to Edge Hill in 1805, and almost immediately Williamson decided to build more houses there, with cellars. And as it turns out, the man really loved cellars. So much so he decided to keep digging them out more. And more. And to join them together. And to dig another level below that one. And why don’t we build a cool double arch on that ceiling? And stick a pointless long tunnel in that one that goes on for ages that you can only get through by crawling. And…
What? Why?
Unfortunately, we only have conjecture here, because Joseph Williamson was extremely secretive - probably because what he was doing was very illegal. Also, he was fucking weird. Disappointingly, early theories that he and his wife were in a religious doomsday cult and wanted to shelter from the apocalypse seem to be unlikely. However, doomsday vibes abounded when navvies digging out the Liverpool to Manchester Railway broke through the top of one of the Williamson Tunnels and fled in fear, believing that the shouting and strange shapes below meant they had dug down so deep they had broken their way into hell.
The reasons for the tunnels are more likely to be a combination of pragmatism and good old Protestant work ethic. The houses sat on top of huge amounts of useful and lucrative sandstone, making it likely that Williamson was running a secret quarry away from the eyes of the taxman. The presence of ornate brick arches point to this - they don’t just look cool, they stop the rock from caving in on the quarrymen’s heads, allowing them to go deeper.
The ornate flourishes and odd, pointless nature of some of the additions are believed to be makework. The working class of Liverpool were in a bad way at the time, with many returning from the Napoleonic wars to find no work waiting for them. Williamson didn’t believe in charity - he believed in an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay. Except a lot of the honest work was totally pointless - turning grindstones whether there was anything to grind or not, filling in holes and then emptying them again, and getting really intricate with the brickwork when it was completely unnecessary. Still, it was said that at one time he employed half the working-class men of Edge Hill, more than anyone else, who no doubt thought that while this was all a bit weird, it sure beat starving to death in the street.
Joseph was not a wife guy. He was married to the job. He swanned off on his wedding day, still wearing his marriage attire, to go hunting, and disliked his wife so much he once deliberately let all the birds out of her aviary. They never had children, and lived separate lives. This detail, along with the frequent hosting of male clergy members in his house has led some (well, just me to be honest) to speculate he could have been gay. Or he could have just been a weird guy who didn’t like women and loved digging massive caverns. He would also obsessively count his wheelbarrows every night and perform petty shit-tests on his friends to make sure they actually liked him.
He was probably wasn’t much fun at parties.
There are other bits and pieces floating around about Williamson, but despite the lengthy introduction, this post isn’t actually about him. It’s about the people who have dedicated chunks of their lives to finding out more about him and his tunnels - the mole people of Edge Hill.
Rediscovering the tunnels
The tunnels were used as a massive municipal waste dump and unofficial sewer for years after Williamson died, and eventually filled up with rubbish and human waste. Complaints about the smell proliferated, and the authorities blocked them up - until a guy called William Hand went down there in the early 1900s and wrote a newspaper article about it (you need to be logged in to Facebook to see this one). Still, not much was done to properly rediscover them, until a group of volunteers were overwhelmed with curiosity in the 90s and smashed their way in with some diggers. There, they found some incredible antique artifacts going back to Williamson’s time, but mainly coal byproduct, rubble and endless rubbish, all the way up to the ceiling of 60+ foot deep caverns. Thankfully, the human waste had by that time decomposed. They dug it out by hand for years, filling skip after skip, which they funded by showing people the caverns - the head office of The Friends of the Williamson Tunnels (a portacabin) still has a sign up encouraging people to donate by telling them the price of a skip. United by the desire to uncover the mysteries of Joseph Williamson and find out once and for all just what was in those damn tunnels, the volunteers worked together side by side with one purpose, until the inevitable happened -they fell out over some petty bullshit and split and hated each other forever.
The People’s Front of Edge Hill
I imagine if you could get one of the volunteers down the pub from each side they would tell a very different story of what happened, but anyone has ever joined a community group will testify to the pettiness and infighting that plague them. From the outside, The Williamson Tunnels Heritage Centre volunteers (henceforth The Heritagers) are the more professional of the two groups. They own the actual visitor centre, although it’s a bit run down. It sells cheap instant coffee, DVDs and mole ornaments. Their tour is (in this author’s humble opinion) not as good. They allow you access to less of their section of the tunnels, appearing to have a more robust attitude to health and safety, and are content to amble through with you for 40 minutes with a largely scripted tour and call it a day. Still, what you see is impressive - even more so when you consider what both groups have dug out between them is suspected to only be the tip of the iceberg.
The Friends of Williamson Tunnels (henceforth The Friends) are defin…
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