Vast Underground Bomb Shelter Reappropriated by Urban Farmers (Wired UK)
A network of tunnels 33 metres under Clapham in London, originally built as a WWII bomb shelter, is being used to grow a range of different salad vegetables destined for Londoners’ plates.
This week, Wired.co.uk paid a visit to the subterranean farm, descending the winding steps deep into the bowels of southwest London. The space is enormous. It’s made up of two seemingly never-ending tunnels (actually 430 metres long), lit — at least during our visit — only by the torches of Steven Dring and Richard Ballard, the founders of Zero Carbon Food, the company behind this agricultural curiosity.
The space — owned by Transport for London — has been lying dormant since WWII, when it was used as a bomb shelter that could accommodate 8,000 people. There have been occasional requests from ambitious club promoters to host parties in the tunnels, but the lack of appropriate fire escapes makes it an unfeasible venue. But not for plants, it seems.
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