THE WHITEHALL TUNNEL

A deep level tunnel from Charring Cross tube station (ex Trafalgar Square Bakerloo Line) to the Treasury, constructed in WWII and extended to the Monck Street Rotundas in the Cold War, linking government buildings.

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The Rotundas

Trafalgar Square

PROPOSAL - Not implemented in full

Figure 16 ‘Post Office Cables at Deep Level in London’ in Public Record ‘The Provision of Line Communications for the Fighting Services During the War’ by H R Harbottle 1946. The red rectangle is enlarged below.

Harbottle’s map enlarged to show his version of the Whitehall Tunnel in 1946, with the modern street pattern in red.

The labelling of locations reads ‘Trafalgar Square’ (Bakerloo line station, now ‘Charing Cross’); ‘Admiralty Citadel’; ‘Federal’ (government telephone exchange, now in the basement of the Ministry of Defence); ‘Air Ministry’ (the ‘New Public Offices’ now the Treasury); and ‘Horseferry Road’ (the ‘Rotundas’, now New Palace Place flats and the Home Office.

Though representative in general of the route there is some doubt about its accuracy in detail - Harbottle may not have been a competent or careful cartographer, and clearly the reproduction method used in the original typescript has bleached out the majority of the OS basemap. The odd square building in Green Park is the ‘R’ of ‘Westminster’.

Until recently the only official plan of the Whitehall Tunnel was that below by Harbottle, but three images have now been released by the UK National Archives.

Another PROPOSAL May 1939

Sketch plan of the first phase November 1941.  Not wholly as built.

The ‘protected route’ from the Cabinet War Rooms to the Whitehall Tunnel lift in Court 6 of the ‘New Public Offices’

Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre