The Tunnel Map Costs £14. Two People Have Asked Since 1994.

MANCHESTER, England — Sheets 3 and 4 of application 78/0412 cost £14, including VAT, at a counter on the ground floor of the city council's planning office. They took nine days to arrive. They show the tunnel.

The application is dated 6 March 1978 and asks for deemed consent for four ventilation shafts. To justify four shafts the applicant's engineer has drawn the thing the shafts were to ventilate: an alignment running 1.9 kilometres, dimensioned in feet and metres both, with chainages every hundred metres and invert levels every fifty, falling from −22.4 metres to −27.1 metres at a gradient of one in 404.

The department that would hold such a tunnel has twice declined to confirm that it exists, and is defending that position at appeal.

Four of five will hand it over

The same line is in four other places.

The water authority holds it on a services constraint plan, resurveyed in 1983 and emailed to us within forty minutes of asking, free. The highway authority holds it on a statutory undertakers' record from 1996; a duty engineer put it on a screen at a depot and let our correspondent photograph the screen. The national archive holds a deposited plan of 1979, orderable by anybody with a reader's ticket.

We laid all four over one another at 1:1250. The line does not move by more than 1.4 metres anywhere along its length, and none of the four is drawn from the others.

The fifth holder is the department, and the fifth record is the one nobody can have.

The log

We asked the council, separately, for its register of requests against that file. It came back in six days as a spreadsheet, at no charge.

Two entries since the log began in 1994.

The first is from March 2003 and belongs to a doctoral student. Dr. Rosalind Weatherall-Osei now lectures in twentieth-century infrastructure and still had the receipt. The file is footnote 212 of her thesis, which has been downloaded forty-one times.

The second is from November 2016. Terence Bickerdike-Nwosu is a retired heating engineer whose basement had never got warm, who suspected a culvert, and who went to the counter to find out what ran under his street.

He wanted the big sheets. Sheet 4 is framed in his hall. It is not the culvert; his floor is uninsulated and he had it lifted in 2018.

The two shafts that are capped

Two of the four shafts stand on public pavement and are photographed often. They appear online, in several places, captioned as active intakes for a facility below.

Sheet 4 annotates both: vent shaft — disused, capped 1991.

We gave sheets 3 and 4 to Nkechi Fairhurst-Lindqvist, a ventilation engineer of twenty-two years, with the title block masked, and asked her what she was looking at. She found the cap detail on both before we told her the date — a concrete plug, a drainage weep, and no plant chamber drawn beneath either.

The warm air people feel at the nearer grating comes from a substation, which is on sheet 2, and is not secret either.

What the appeal is about

The closest thing in our own vault is PX-1402, six sheets of mechanical drawings for a substructure with thirteen sheets missing. That story is about an absence. This one is not. Nothing is missing here. Eleven sheets, all present, held in a public building, indexed, priced, and photocopied on demand by a woman who found them in four minutes.

Mr Ashe-Mubarak's reply runs at the foot of this brief and it is the most serious answer we have had to a story this year. He argues that a refusal to confirm what exists now is not the same object as a 1978 drawing of what was proposed, and that we have called a drawing a map. He is right about the word.

But the shape stands. One arm of the state is defending at tribunal a line that another arm sells downstairs for the price of a paperback, and has sold twice in thirty-two years.

It is not hidden. It is unvisited. Those are not the same condition, and only one of them can be fixed by a department.