--- title: "The State Built A Secure Room Above A Shoe Shop. The Lease Explains Why." dek: "A planning application for a rooftop plant enclosure names copper mesh shielding, filtered mains and acoustic separation sufficient to prevent intelligible speech. The council file is public. The department is on year nine of a three-year lease." kind: news (News) desk: Shadow Governance author: Marcus Oyelaran and Nadia Ferreira-Ost (fictional) published: 2026-08-18T06:00:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/secure-room-above-the-shoe-shop tags: planning, HM Land Registry, government estate, screened rooms, Martlebury genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # The State Built A Secure Room Above A Shoe Shop. The Lease Explains Why. *A planning application for a rooftop plant enclosure names copper mesh shielding, filtered mains and acoustic separation sufficient to prevent intelligible speech. The council file is public. The department is on year nine of a three-year lease.* Appendix C is three pages long. On page two, under *Design Criteria*, it asks for a sound reduction index of Rw 62 dB between one second-floor room and the party wall, and then says what the figure is for: "sufficient to prevent intelligible speech transmission at the party wall." The party wall is shared with a bakery. The room is above a shoe shop, on the high street of a market town of 11,400 people. Appendix F, the electrical schedule, itemises copper mesh bonded to six surfaces, a filtered mains supply and a single-point earth. Nobody leaked any of this. It has sat on a district council's planning portal since March 2024, because planning law required it to. > **Figure:** 12–14 Shipgate Street, in section — see https://theyburied.com/article/secure-room-above-the-shoe-shop ## What we were looking for instead Our correspondent was reading Wenloe District Council's weekly list for a story about a supermarket delivery bay. Application 24/01188/FUL is a rooftop plant enclosure at 12–14 Shipgate Street. Four condensers and an acoustic louvre. Forty-one pages. The kind of application an officer approves on a Thursday without reading past the front sheet. He read appendix C because it was short. ## What is in the file An acoustic report by Harnwell Acoustics, commissioned by the applicant, assessing the plant against its neighbours — and, because the plant serves one particular room, describing that room in order to size the plant. Rw 62 dB is not a comfort figure. A separating wall built to that standard runs to roughly twice the mass of the party wall it is set against, and the report gives its reason in the sentence quoted above. Appendix F is the electrical schedule. Copper mesh to floor, ceiling and four walls, bonded and continuous. A mains filter specified at 100 dB attenuation from 10 kHz to 1 GHz. One earth conductor, one termination, no second path to ground. That is a screened room. There is nothing else it is. ## The lease HM Land Registry sells the register of any registered title in England for £3. Four documents cost us £12. The second floor of 12–14 Shipgate Street is held on a lease granted in 2017 to a body corporate named on the government's own published list of departmental agencies. The rent is £58,400 a year. The term is fifteen years, with tenant's breaks at years three and six. Neither was taken. The department described the arrangement internally as a three-year one. It is in year nine. The other tenants are Corrie & Vane, a letting agency, on the first floor, and Pallister's, which has sold shoes on the ground floor since 1974. ## Why it is there The department sold its regional building in 2017. The replacement was scheduled for 2023, deferred, and cancelled in 2022. In between, a function had to sit somewhere. The 2017 options appraisal — nine of its fourteen pages released to us — compares four choices. A temporary fit-out inside the government estate came out £1.1m more expensive across the term than the high-street lease, most of it in decant and reinstatement. So the answer to *why is it above a shoe shop* is: because in 2017 that was the cheaper of two poor options, and nobody has since been required to decide again. > There is no national-security exemption in the planning acts. There is a form. Nobody filled it in. > > — Dilys Corrigan-Mbatha ## Three days on Shipgate Street We watched the street door — one door, serving all three floors — from 07:00 to 19:00 on three consecutive weekdays in June. Eleven different people used it. Nine of them work in the shoe shop. One was a courier with a parcel for the letting agency. One was the letting agency's Tuesday cleaner. We do not conclude that the second floor is empty. We watched a door for thirty-six hours in June and counted eleven people, and we have printed the count rather than the impression it left. ## The council's answer, which is better than ours Dilys Corrigan-Mbatha runs development management at Wenloe. She was not pleased with us, and her objection stands up. "There is no national-security exemption in the planning acts," she said. "There is a form. Nobody filled it in." She went on. "You have described us as having published a secret. We published an application. The applicant's own consultants wrote down what the room is for, in their own document, and sent it to us with no restriction on it at all. We are not permitted to guess which of forty-one pages a government department would prefer we redacted, and I would not want to work at a council that guessed." She also pointed out that Wenloe did not put the acoustic report next to the lease. We did. ## What this desk takes from it Not that the state hid a room above a shoe shop. The state rents a room above a shoe shop, at a rent recorded in a public register, in a building whose specification it published itself by not asking not to. The duller fact is the load-bearing one. A department sold a building against a delivery date that another part of government later cancelled, and the bridge became the road. Somewhere there is an official whose predecessor's predecessor signed a fifteen-year lease with breaks at years three and six, who has taken neither, who has done nothing wrong, and who will be there in year fifteen. ## Sources (invented) - Wenloe District Council planning file 24/01188/FUL, Rooftop plant enclosure, 12–14 Shipgate Street — 41 pages — Downloaded from the council's public portal; the acoustic report is appendix C, the electrical schedule appendix F (Read March 2026; on the portal since March 2024) - HM Land Registry, Three registers and one lease plan — Purchased at the statutory fee of £3 a document, £12 in total (April 2026) - Departmental estate options appraisal, 2017, Comparison of four options after the disposal of the regional building — Obtained under freedom of information; released in part, 9 of 14 pages (Requested October 2025, released May 2026) - Dilys Corrigan-Mbatha, Head of development management, Wenloe District Council — Interviewed in person at the council offices, then twice by telephone (June 2026) - Harnwell Acoustics, Consultants; authors of appendix C — Telephoned; declined to discuss a client's report; confirmed the report is theirs and unaltered (June 2026) ## What we could not confirm - That the room is accredited for anything. We have a specification, not a certificate. A specification describes what somebody asked a builder for; accreditation is a separate act by a separate body, and no such body has told us anything. - What is done in the room, which we did not ask and did not try to find out. Our questions to the department were about the lease and the estate paper. - Whether anybody from the department is ever in the building. We watched one street door for three twelve-hour days in June and counted eleven different people. Three days in June is three days in June, in a town where the school holidays start on the twenty-fourth. ## Right of reply **The Department for Regional Delivery** (Replied on 24 July 2026 over the signature of Fenella Oduya-Brant, Chief Operating Officer. Printed in full and unedited.): > The department will neither confirm nor deny the use to which any part of its estate is put. I am aware that this reads, to your readers, as an admission. It is not one, and I would like to explain why we say it, because your newspaper has been fair enough elsewhere in this draft to have earned the explanation. > > If we confirmed the use of rooms that are not sensitive and declined to confirm the use of rooms that are, the declining would itself be the answer. The policy has to be uniform or it is not a policy. We apply it to a stationery cupboard in Swindon. > > On your factual points I can be more helpful than you expect. > > The lease is as you describe it. The rent is as you describe it. The 2017 appraisal is ours, the £1.1m is our own figure, and we do not dispute your reading of it. The break at year three was not exercised because the replacement building had by then been deferred, and it was not exercised at year six because the replacement had by then been cancelled, and there was at that point nothing to break to. I would rather you printed that than left your readers to imagine something more interesting. > > What I object to is the shape of your story. You have written a piece about a department that sold a building in 2017 against a delivery date that a different part of government subsequently cancelled, and about the fact that a temporary arrangement has now outlasted the project it was bridging. That is a real failure and it is ours. You have then dressed it as a story about a secret room, because the second story can be photographed and the first one cannot. > > I would also ask you to think about the three days you spent watching a door. The people who went through it work in a shoe shop. They did not consent to being counted, they have no press office, and they will read your newspaper before we do. --- 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.