A house featuring underground tunnels hand dug 15m below ground by the owner over twenty years is on sale for £300K. Civil engineer Tony Deane spent two decades creating a subterranean network of rooms and corridors under his home in Tilehurst. The unique complex contains more than 1,300 square feet of underground space, including tunnels and storage rooms - and even a hand-built railway.
One room even features a secret entrance - hidden inside a rocket by the pool. There is a one-tonne goods lift and two secret doors - one formed by a 1.5-tonne sliding concrete wall. Hidden for decades beneath a workshop in a suburb of Tilehurst in Reading - the network descends through four levels and reaches more than 15m below ground.
Tony, whose initial day job was in the construction of aerodrome and airport infrastructure, started the construction work by himself during the 1980s and ‘90s. He was also assisted by his six children. The only apparatus the family used to conduct the digging and move chalk were buckets and wheelbarrows.
Richard Worrall, auctioneer and consultant at BTG Eddisons Property Auctions, said: “In all my years as an auctioneer, I’ve never seen anything like this before - it’s utterly amazing and, I think, unique." What a feat to create this as a family project and as a hobby.” The Deane family’s subterranean projects began even earlier, in the 1960s, with the construction of underground changing rooms next to the property's swimming pool. The entrance was hidden behind a 23ft-high rocket, which is still in place today. Despite the scale of the project, its existence is understood to have remained largely unknown outside the family, including to neighbours in the surrounding residential area.
Richard Worrall said: “Most of these tunnels were dug through chalk, which is naturally self-supporting, while, in some places, where required, structural concrete was used and cast by hand. Incredibly, absolutely everything was excavated manually. Mr Deane also constructed a railway through the tunnels to transport the excavated chalk, as well as building a four-layer, one-tonne goods lift to carry it to ground level.” The site is accessed via a secure gated driveway and includes a 2,500 sq ft workshop arranged over three floors, parking, gardens, a large swimming pool and changing rooms.
Planning consent was granted by West Berkshire Council in December 2024 for a 5,000 sq ft, five-bedroom, two-storey house to be built on the site of the swimming pool, while conversion of the workshop has consent for conversion to a three-bedroom house. Richard added: “The underground space is obviously a game changer to say the least and we believe it could offer an imaginative buyer a range of potential uses, anything from secure storage, a fallout shelter or an EMP-resistant data centre to a prepper’s paradise." The property has a guide price of £300,000-£325,000 and will be included in BTG Eddisons Property Auctions’ live stream auction on 28-29 October. For further details and bidding information, visit www.btgeddisonspropertyauctions.com.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing