Underland

by Robert Macfarlane

  The extent of our cities’ verticality is growing rapidly. With the rise in the number and size of the planet’s cities since the mid twentieth century, and with the development of new technologies, the heights and depths of our cities have stretched to astonishing magnitudes: Pierre Bélanger estimates that the ‘infrastructure that supports urban life’ now spans from ‘10,000 metres below the sea to 35,000 km above the surface of the earth’. Stephen Graham also documents this elongation of city space into the air above and the earth below:

  Complex subterranean spaces below major cities . . . are themselves three-dimensional labyrinths which stack and intertwine infrastructures and built spaces as deeply as many cities rise into the sky . . . Major cities are thus increasingly organised as multi-level volumes both above and below ground.

  Such a densely stacked modern cityscape leads, inevitably, to a new geography of inequality that requires reading in vertical terms. Broadly speaking, wealth levitates and poverty sinks. Privilege prefers to distance itself from the mess of the street by means of altitude – those fiftieth-floor infinity pools, those rooftop penthouse suites – and tends only to delve below ground when that delving offers security or privacy (the deep-sunk document stores maintained by US security firms such as Blackwater, for instance, or the oligarch basements dug down into the London clay at Mayfair and other high-end, low-rise residential districts of London).

  Poverty, by contrast, pulls people down, pools low. This is the verticalization of wealth and power foreseen by H. G. Wells in his 1895 novel The Time Machine, with the mining subterranean Morlocks and the delicate above-ground Eloi. Today, in the network of storm drains beneath Las Vegas, a shaken-out sub-population has taken up residence, including people struggling with addictions as well as homelessness. When rain does fall in that glittering desert city, and flash floods fill the storm drains, the livelihoods and sometimes the lives of these people are washed away. In India’s cities, sewers and septic tanks are often cleared by thousands of daily-wage workers, lowered on ropes to scoop out by hand and bucket the human waste, trash and congealed fat that accumulate in such places. When a manhole cover is first shifted to give access to a sewer, workers are glad to see flies and cockroaches swarm from the opening: it means that toxic gases have not gathered to a lethal degree. The life expectancy of these men is around ten years less than the national average. Hundreds die each decade by asphyxiation or drowning, their deaths typically unrecorded and unrecompensed.

  Poverty and powerlessness have characterized the history of Paris’s tunnels, too. Walter Benjamin worked hard in The Arcades Project to retrieve the obscured histories of those spaces. He documents how, for instance, after the June Insurrection of 1848, those who had been taken prisoner were moved around the city by means of the quarry tunnels and the catacombs, shifted along the network from fort to fort in order to keep them secure and invisible. The catacomb labyrinth had become what we would now call a ‘dark site’ – an extra-jurisdictional space where special rendition of political prisoners could occur, out of public sight and mind.

  I find Benjamin’s historiography to be compassionate in its preservation of the details of the underground experiences of these prisoners, and others like them. ‘The cold in these underground corridors [was] so intense that many prisoners had to run continually or move their arms about to keep from freezing,’ he notes of the insurrectionists, ‘and no one dared to lie down on the cold stones.’ He preserves, too, moments of solidarity and companionship: how ‘the prisoners gave all the passages names of Paris streets, and whenever they met one another, they exchanged addresses’; and how, in the eighteenth century, prisoners waiting in incarceration cells to be chained as oar-slaves in the galleys that worked the Seine would sing to one another, communicating by melody in the blackness.

  ~

  We sleep late the next morning, and eat chocolate for breakfast while the monkey gods watch us through charred eyes.

  ‘Time to move,’ says Lina. ‘We’ve got a rendezvous this evening way north of here, with some friends of mine, in the Salle du Drapeau. There’ll be good things if we can get there – but that’s going to depend on the stability of the ceilings, and whether there have been any collapses since I was last along that route. And before then, there are places I want to reach.’

  We push back through the chatière – feet first this time, bending around and down to find footing in the passage – and then it’s off at Lina’s quick-march pace, charging the dry tunnels, wading the wet ones, picking carefully past well-shafts, pushing north by north-west. Again I am amazed at Lina’s ability to navigate without consulting the maps we carry. She seems to have internalized this three-dimensional maze, or developed a below-ground mental GPS.

  Late in the morning we drop down a set of stone staircases, moving between levels of the labyrinth, to a point named on the maps as Hell Well.

  ‘Here’s Hell,’ says Lina. ‘This is not an easy place in any sense.’

  She points to a low tunnel leading off the main passage; an access adit perhaps two feet high. ‘Through there,’ says Lina. ‘You go first, Rob. You’ll need to lie on your back to make it.’

  I lean back, reach under and ahead of me, find the adit’s edge with my fingers, pull through, look up and stop dead.

  I am in a vertical shaft and above me is a suspended wall of clay and earth, perhaps ten feet high, into which hundreds of human bones are embedded: skulls, ribs and limbs. In the belly of the well below are hundreds more fallen bones. It is a point where a burial ground has begun to disgorge its contents down through a breach in the tunnel network. The rough limestone from which the shaft has been hewn is also visibly thick with bodies – whelks and spiral shells that are fossilized uncrushed in the stone’s sediment – and I have a sudden sense of both cities, upper and lower, as a single necropolis. The city of the dead antedates the city of the living . . . is the forerunner, almost the core, of every living city . . .

  Lina and Jay pull themselves one by one into Hell Well. Afterwards, we speak little as we continue to traverse the passageways. In that region of the catacombs bones are profuse. There is no order to death here, no names or memorialization, just containment. Occasionally we pass under a vertical circular shaft leading up through bedrock to a manhole cover in the street. Some have ladder rungs. I pause under one and can see distant glimpses of light, hear faint clanks as the cover is moved by the footfall of pedestrians going about their upper-world business.

  Once, in a long and boneless tunnel, I see flames flickering far ahead of us. Then the flames abruptly disappear. Lina sees them too, but when we reach the point of their vanishing there is no side tunnel into which they could have turned. ‘The lamps of other cataphiles,’ says Lina uncertainly. ‘Though I don’t see where they could have gone.’ Then she smiles. ‘Or perhaps the ghost of Philibert Aspairt, lost down here in 1793 and not discovered until eleven years later. Dead, obviously. Arguably the world’s first urban explorer, and probably the worst.’

  ~

  For some years before coming to the catacombs, I had been finding my way into the subculture of urban exploration: this was how I had come to know Lina. Urban exploration might best be defined as adventurous trespass in the built environment. Among the requirements for participation are claustrophilia, lack of vertigo, a taste for decay, a fascination with infrastructure, a readiness to climb fences and lift manhole covers, and a familiarity with the varying laws of access across different jurisdictions. Among the sites favoured by urban explorers are skyscrapers, disused factories and hospitals, former military installations, bunkers, bridges and storm-drain networks. A serious explorer needs to be content sitting on the counterweight of a crane 400 feet above the street, or skanking along a sewer twenty yards under the asphalt. Urban explorers shun the Sturm und Drang of mountains. Their thrills are niche, their epiphanies mucky. Rumours circulate about entry points which might give access to unseen spaces. Secrets are jealously guarded, closely shared.
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br />   The subculture has its subcultures. Just as certain climbers prefer granite to gritstone, and certain cavers prefer wet systems to dry ones, so explorers have their specialisms: there are bunkerologists, skywalkers, builderers, track-runners, ‘drainers’. Most explorers start out in ruins, though: these tend to be the easiest sites to access, and the cheap aesthetic pay-offs – the pathos of abandonment, the material residue of inscrutable histories – are rapid, usually claimed in the coin of photographs. Ruinistas dig ‘derp’ (explorer’s slang for ‘derelict and ruined places’). Detroit was the world mecca for derp, until it became a city-sized version of Don DeLillo’s ‘most photographed barn in America’, cloaked in a haze of voyeuristic ruin-porn imagery (HD stills of dusty ballrooms and atria, with artfully scattered detritus in the foreground, images that erase a hundred aspects of that city’s hope and despair).

  Urban exploration is international in its geography, with groups, crews and chapters around the world. There are a surprising number of female explorers, and the class base is mixed, drawing often on a disaffected and less legally obedient demographic. In Brisbane an explorer known as Dsankt boats into the underland like some latter-day Charon, boarding small skiffs in the rivers on the city’s outskirts, following tides up the intake valves and into the abstract zones of the sub-city. In Canada, an explorer has penetrated the network of surge pipes that service the Ontario Generating Station at Niagara Falls: huge-gauge tunnels of riveted iron, with water-filled penstocks dropping vertically down from their floors. In the white sandstone under Minneapolis, digging teams work in shifts to open routes into new caves. In New York City, explorers ride the buses with faces pressed to the window glass, scouting out trunk conduits and side pipes by means of their street-level outlets, scribbling maps on notepaper or tablets as they go. In Madrid, drainers track the disappearance of streams and creeks as they reach the fringes of the city and get culverted down and under.

  At the avant-garde of urban exploration are the infiltrators, the ‘real’ explorers, who tend to be more stimulated by systems and networks than by single sites, and who cherish the challenge involved in accessing super-secure locations. Like extreme climbers, infiltrators experience what Al Alvarez called ‘feeding the rat’, in his classic essay on climbing and fear. They are obsessives: they develop tunnel vision. They run tracks in the brief gaps between trains, they take dinghies down storm drains, they lift-surf – and occasionally they die. At its more political fringes, urban exploration mandates itself as a radical act of disobedience and liberation: a protest against state constraints on freedom within the city. Just as psychogeographers in the original Parisian Situationist vision of Guy Debord sought to discover astonishment on the terrain of the familiar by breaking out of the grooves of behaviour defined by capital, so politicized urban explorers present their trespasses as activism that ‘recod[es] people’s normalised relationships to city space’.

  There are aspects of urban exploration that leave me deeply uneasy, and cannot be fended off by indemnifying gestures of self-awareness on the part of its practitioners. I dislike its air of hipster entitlement, its inattention towards those people whose working lives involve the construction, operation and maintenance – rather than the exploration – of these hidden structures of the city. I am sceptical of the dandified nature of its photographic culture, which seems chiefly to refocus the problems of Caspar David Friedrich’s iconic 1818 painting, Wanderer above a Sea of Fog. And I feel uneasy at the opportunities urban exploration holds for insensitivity to those people who have no choice but to exist in contexts of dereliction and ruin.

  Other aspects of the subculture have come to compel me, though, and so I began – cautiously – to spend increasing amounts of time with those who self-identified as explorers. I was especially struck by the manic systematicity of much explorer practice – its devotion to making visible ‘the black box of infrastructure’ and the ‘dark fibre’ of modern information exchange. I liked urban exploration’s awareness of the porosity of the city’s fabric, the proliferation of portals, rifts and drifts it perceived, and also its sense of sub-cities – like natural underlands – as spaces existing in long-term, slow-motion flux. And I was fascinated by urban exploration’s pre-modern precedents, and the ways they intersected with histories of poverty and hope within cities: the Victorian mudlarkers and sewage pickers, for instance, who wandered the tunnels and outfalls of London’s sewer system, holding their lamps aloft in the stench, sieving gold teeth and pearl earrings out of the ordure.

  The poet and naturalist Edward Thomas seems to be far distant from urban exploration, but one day I discovered a passage from a 1911 essay in which Thomas imagined an abandoned London where he was free to adventure through the city’s infrastructure, both above and below ground. ‘London deserted would become a much pleasanter place,’ wrote Thomas with a misanthropic flourish. ‘I like to think what mysteries the shafts, the tubes, the tunnels and the vaults would make – and what a place to explore!’

  ~

  Early that afternoon, Lina leads us to a vault the name and location of which I am forbidden to disclose.

  We wall-kick one by one through a high chatière and find ourselves crouching in a desert zone. The floor is a rolling dunescape of stone-sand, compacted together and hardened over the centuries.

  In places the dunes rise close to the ceiling. In places they meet it. Elsewhere they dip to leave crawl spaces a couple of feet in height, just large enough to admit a human body. From where we crouch there are seven or eight possible routes leading away from us, and each one in turn splits and spreads away. It is a threatening maze, and it reminds me of the boulder ruckle under the Mendips. Here, though, there is no Ariadne’s thread to be followed.

  Lina is brisk, all business. ‘We leave our bags here. It’s impossible to move with them on where we’re going. Follow me.’

  She slithers off on her belly along the dunes, heading for one of the right-hand crawl spaces. Jay and I slither after her, using feet and hands to move ourselves on, lizarding up and over a pass in the dunes where there is only just room to ease my skull between floor and ceiling. I try to move fast enough to keep Lina’s boots in view.

  Another rise in the dunes brings us still closer to the roof, and I feel my skull scrape on rock as I ease through, head turned sideways for clearance, face pressed against the stone-sand. Lina pauses for thought at only one junction, and then on we snake for ten minutes, until a dune slopes away to a black rabbit-hole, down which we each go head first.

  I pop out of the rabbit-hole into a Wunderkammer.

  We are in a chamber that is cuboid in form, each of its vertices perhaps twelve feet long. Its walls are of clean-cut yellow stone, its floor is curiously swept and it contains nothing at all except for a slender staircase of stone, which advances out of the far wall like the approach to a ziggurat. Each step of the staircase is marked on its side in black handwriting. Placed in the dead centre of each step of the staircase is a sample of stone, crystal or metal, each a different colour: white sandstone, yellow sandstone, quartz, limestone.

  Lina looks rightly proud to have found the chamber and to be able to show it to us. ‘This we call the——,’ she says. ‘There are other examples of similar rooms spread out through the labyrinth, but this is the best, and also the least known.’

  It is a Cabinet of Mineralogy – a teaching room from the period when the catacombs were part of the real estate of Paris’s School of Mines. The room has been more or less undisturbed since it was closed at some point in the early 1900s. There is an austerity to the room’s structure, and an elaborate care to the ritual placings of the samples – each on its own swept step.

  We sit for a while in the Cabinet of Mineralogy. We eat, drink, rest, talk. Lina tells stories of her explorations in the vertical city. She describes climbing one of the chimneys of the Battersea Power Station, and then leaving the power station by means of an underground tunnel system, out of which she popped up in the middle
of the Chelsea Flower Show, grimy and wide-eyed among the aspidistras.

  Lina’s great wish as an explorer is to enter the Odessa catacombs. Odessa, like Paris, is a city built on limestone, and it contains the world’s most extensive sub-urban quarries. Some 1,500 miles of tunnel make up Odessa’s invisible city, sinking to a depth of 160 feet over three levels. I have seen maps of the Odessa labyrinth. More even than the Parisian network, it has the improvised appearance of an organism or organisms: the branching structure of coral, perhaps. When the Germans were closing in on Odessa during the Second World War, the Soviets left behind Ukrainian rebel groups hidden under the city in the catacombs. Some of these stay-behinds remained below ground for over a year, suffering from malnutrition, malaria and vitamin deficiencies, occasionally surfacing to seek information or make attacks. Cat-and-mouse games were played between occupiers and the rebel groups; the Germans gassed and bombed the tunnel systems in an attempt to kill the Ukrainians. After the war in Odessa, the underworld moved into this underland, and smugglers and criminals enlarged the network for their own purposes.

  ‘The Odessa tunnels make ours here in Paris look like a sideshow,’ says Lina. ‘But it’s dangerous there. Especially for a woman. There are bad stories about what can happen there, about what has happened. Definitely murders, probably at least one death through simply getting lost.’

  Jay tells a story of taking a party of three novices caving in Aggy, a Welsh cave system, access to which begins with a notorious long rift so narrow that it is almost impossible for a human who has entered it either to turn around or to be passed. That day, said Jay, one of the novices got stuck in the rift, and began to panic. Her name was Luna, and she was a professional dominatrix who plied her trade from a basement beneath Baker Street.

  ‘I’d assumed, given her day job, that she was at ease both with confinement and underground space,’ says Jay. ‘Not so, as it turned out. It took three hours to rescue her. I couldn’t get past her, so I had to exit the system another way, then come back along the rift so I could speak to her face to face, calm her down, help her work out how to free herself and keep moving forwards. Then I had to reverse down the rift myself, moving backwards, keeping her talking the whole time. I distracted her by asking for details of her dungeon’s price list. An eye-opening variety of services were on offer down there.’