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A fascinating exploration of the underground world and its history beneath the surface of the Potteries in North Staffordshire.

Beneath the surface of the country's second largest city lies a little-known world that encompasses the history of Birmingham. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Birmingham profited from its position in the heart of the Midlands as the centre of science, technology, industrial development and culture for the area, growing rapidly to become the most important manufacturing city in the country. Although much of the city has changed over the last two centuries, not least through the aerial bombing raids during the Second World War and post-war redevelopment, the industrial heritage of Birmingham remains an important part of the city. Going Underground: Birmingham takes the reader on a tour of subterranean Birmingham. The stories include the bizarre and sometimes nefarious world beneath the surface of the city. We visit the tunnels built for an underground railway only ever used as air-raid shelters, catacombs, closed railway tunnels, a former feeder canal used to bring goods from warehouses, a culvert containing Birmingham's only river, the old passage to New Street station (said to have been cut through the site of a former Jewish cemetery and once used to store bodies awaiting transportation), a tunnel between a former police station and the law courts walked by many from the city's criminal past, hidden passages created during Birmingham's growth period in the Georgian and Victorian ages, and much more. This fascinating portrait of underground Birmingham will interest all those who know the city.

At the heart of the historic Suffolk market town of Bury St Edmunds is the ruined eleventh-century abbey. The magnificent abbey church, once one of the richest and most powerful Benedictine monasteries in England and among the largest in Europe, was built over several generations. The chosen material was flint encased with limestone, the bonding agent being lime mortar. Chalk, the necessary requirement for this, had to be mined deeply and therefore Bury has chalk mines to the east, west and in a central part of town. Centuries later, catastrophic consequences occurred when thirty houses that had been built above the chalk mines were affected by property blight and had to be demolished. With the closure of the abbey following the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539, there were stories of medieval ghostly figures traversing the town via secret tunnels, unable to rest. Some of their Anglo-Saxon ancestors were discovered in a cemetery when building works were underway on the edge of town. In Going Underground: Bury St Edmunds, local author Martyn Taylor offers a fascinating insight into this Suffolk town's heritage lying hidden beneath its surface. Different chapters focus on tunnels, burial sites, chalk mines, cellars, municipal works, military defences, parch marks and much more. Illustrated throughout, this book will reveal subterranean surprises from ancient cellars to Victorian sewers. Take an intriguing look underground and discover how much history lies beneath your feet in Bury St Edmunds.

Edinburgh has a fascinating 'Underground City', much of which is open to the public. It is made up of many different aspects, with a turbulent and intriguing past stretching back hundreds of years. Features include hidden passages and cellars, ancient buried streets like Marlyn's Wynd and Mary King's Close (sealed after an outbreak of plague), castle dungeons and escape tunnels, a warren of vaults and chambers under Edinburgh's mighty bridges, abandoned or repurposed rail tunnels, and anomalies like the strange subterranean dwelling of Gilmerton Cove. Award-winning author and historian Jan-Andrew Henderson explores the legendary world beneath the streets and locations of Edinburgh in this pictorial guide.