---
title: "The Tunnel Map Costs £14. Two People Have Asked Since 1994."
dek: "A department has twice refused to confirm this tunnel exists. Its alignment is drawn, dimensioned and levelled on sheets 3 and 4 of a 1978 ventilation-shaft application, in a council file open to anybody."
kind: brief (Brief)
desk: Shadow Governance
author: Marcus Oyelaran (fictional)
published: 2026-08-23T05:00:00Z
url: https://theyburied.com/article/brief-tunnel-map-fourteen-pounds
tags: Manchester, planning files, ventilation shafts, freedom of information, public counters
genre: satire
status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented
---

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

*A department has twice refused to confirm this tunnel exists. Its alignment is drawn, dimensioned and levelled on sheets 3 and 4 of a 1978 ventilation-shaft application, in a council file open to anybody.*

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.

> **Figure:** One alignment, five holders, two requests in thirty-two years — see https://theyburied.com/article/brief-tunnel-map-fourteen-pounds

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.

> They were very helpful. The girl on the desk found it in about four minutes, and then she asked if I wanted the big sheets.
>
> — Terence Bickerdike-Nwosu

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.

## Sources (invented)

- Application 78/0412, sheets 1–11, Deemed-consent application, four ventilation shafts, dated 6 March 1978 — Ordered at the planning counter; £11.67 plus VAT, £14 in total; collected after nine days (Ordered 4 August 2026, collected 13 August 2026)
- The council's file-request log, Register of counter and postal requests against planning files, 1994 to date — Requested separately under the environmental information regulations; supplied as a spreadsheet in six days, no charge (August 2026)
- Nkechi Fairhurst-Lindqvist, Ventilation engineer, twenty-two years on tunnel and deep-basement systems — Given sheets 3 and 4 with the title block masked and asked what she was looking at (August 2026)
- Terence Bickerdike-Nwosu, The 2016 requester; retired heating engineer — Traced through the log entry, telephoned, then visited at home; read this brief before publication (August 2026)
- Dr. Rosalind Weatherall-Osei, The 2003 requester; now lectures in twentieth-century infrastructure — Interviewed by video call; sent us her thesis and the receipt, which she still had (August 2026)

## Documents cited (invented)

- PX-1402: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-1402

## What we could not confirm

- Whether the tunnel was built as drawn. A consent is not a construction. Sheets 3 and 4 show an alignment the shafts were to serve; the water authority's 1983 resurvey and the 1996 undertakers' return both record something on that line, but nobody at this desk has been underground and we are not going to write as though we have.
- Whether the request log is complete. It starts in 1994 with the computerised system. Paper counterfoils for the years before that were destroyed in 2001 under a twelve-year retention schedule, which the council confirmed in writing. So our figure is two requests since 1994, not two requests ever.
- What the other two shafts are. Sheet 4 draws four. Two stand on public pavement and we have photographed them. The other two fall inside a fenced operational yard, we were refused access twice, and we cannot tell you whether they were built at all.

## Right of reply

**Duncan Ashe-Mubarak, head of information rights at the department** (Replied 19 August 2026. Printed in full and unedited, including the paragraph about our headline.):

> I am going to answer you properly, which means starting with the thing your brief treats as an absurdity, because it is not one.
> 
> The exemption we maintain is not an exemption over a drawing. It is a refusal to confirm or deny that a particular asset exists and is held by us. Those are different objects. A 1978 sheet drawn by a consulting engineer to justify four shafts tells a reader what was proposed to be built forty-eight years ago by somebody who was not us. My confirming it is a statement about what is there now, who holds it, and whether it is in use, and those three facts are not on your sheet and will not become available for £14.
> 
> You write that one arm of the state protects what another sells. I would put it differently. One arm of the state published a planning application, as the law requires, in 1978, and has kept it available, as the law requires, ever since. Another arm declines to make a statement it is not obliged to make. Neither arm is contradicting the other. You have found a gap between a historical record and a present-day assertion and described it as hypocrisy, and I do not think you would accept that reasoning if it were applied to your own archive.
> 
> I will concede the part that deserves conceding. The two shafts on the pavement are annotated as capped, and you are right that photographs of them circulate with captions saying otherwise, and it is not in anybody's interest for that to continue. I have asked whether the annotation can be confirmed on the record and I will write to you again either way. If the answer is no, I will tell you that it is no and you may print that too.
> 
> On your request log. Two people in thirty-two years is a number I recognise from my own side of this. I have handled requests for eleven years. The overwhelming majority of what people believe to be secret is simply unexamined, and a great deal of my working life is spent explaining to correspondents that the document they want has been sitting in a public building since before they were born. That is a genuinely useful thing for your readers to learn and I am glad you have printed it.
> 
> What I object to is your headline, and I want to be specific about why. You have called it a map. A map is a representation of what is. That sheet is a representation of what was intended, endorsed by an authority that was not in a position to verify whether it was ever executed. Your own third bullet under Unverified says exactly this, clearly and fairly, and it sits a long way down the page, by which time the word map has done its work.
> 
> I would rather you had called it a drawing. It would have cost you nothing, and it would have been true.

---
They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.