Subterranea is sexy

‘Sometimes when I’m down here,’ says Harry, ‘I get them to stop the train in the middle of a tunnel. Just for a minute or two, so I can savour the peace.’

Harry Huskisson is press officer for the British Postal Museum and Archive. He’s showing me the ‘Mail Rail’, the GPO’s underground train system, which until 2003 carried letters across London. The museum plans to reopen it as a tourist attraction. Subject to funding, by 2016 you could be mooching around the train depot underneath Mount Pleasant sorting office, and later on maybe even riding one of the mini-trains which defeated the capital’s traffic jams by whisking letters and parcels from Whitechapel to Paddington via Oxford Street.

When I told a friend I was being granted a sneak preview, he replied by calling me a noun, quite a short one which indicated his envy. And having written a book inspired by London’s Tube system, I know just how much people love the network’s ‘ghost’ stations, the disused ones such as Aldwych. Tourist visits down there sell out quicker than Take That concerts. It seems that we all get excited by going underground. Subterranea is sexy. Why should this be?

An obvious first thought is that it revives our inner six-year-old. What could be more of a thrill than zooming through a tunnel deep beneath the ground? They showed The Great Escape on TV recently. You could write that at any time and be confident of being right, but the latest showing was in tribute to last month’s 70th anniversary of the real events that inspired the film. Even though it’s one of those movies you know backwards, you always end up watching it, and as usual when it came to the bit where one of the escapees measures the tunnel by pushing himself along on a trolley I found myself saying ‘I want to do that.’