Beneath the streets of London, a whole hidden city lies half-forgotten, full of Edwardian-era tunnels and disused railway equipment. A new book called “Hidden London: Discovering the Forgotten Underground” takes us down into the abandoned tributaries of the city’s subterranean transportation network to tell us tales about its past.

Written by a group of directors and collectors at the London Transport Museum, the book features fascinating photographs by Toby Madden and Andy Davies, views most people don’t get to enjoy in person.

“Hidden London is a lavishly illustrated history of disused and repurposed London Underground spaces. It provides the first narrative of a previously secret and barely understood aspect of London’s history. Behind locked doors and lost entrances lies a secret world of abandoned stations, redundant passageways, empty elevator shafts, and cavernous ventilation ducts. The Tube is an ever-expanding network that has left in its wake hidden places and spaces.”

“Hidden London opens up the lost worlds of London’s Underground and offers a fascinating analysis of why Underground spaces—including the deep-level shelter at Clapham South, the closed Aldwych station, the lost tunnels of Euston—have fallen into disuse and how they have been repurposed. With access to previously unseen archives, architectural drawings, and images, the authors create an authoritative account of London’s hidden Underground story. This surprising and at times myth-breaking narrative interweaves spectacular, newly commissioned photography of disused stations and Underground structures today.”

The book made its debut September 10 on Yale University Press, authored by David Bownes, Chris Nix, Siddy Holloway and Sam Mullins. It’s also part of a new “Hidden London” exhibition at the London Transport Museum, which opens October 11 and will feature a large collection of rare archive photos, objects and diagrams from disused stations as well as a recreated abandoned ticket hall and secret life-size underground dining room.

Manually chipping away at rock for hours, two cave explorers have discovered a massive, previously unknown system of prehistoric caves beneath the streets of Montreal. Estimated to be around 15,000 years old, the Ice Age cave network was found about 30 feet beneath the city’s Pie-XII Park adjacent to the St. Léonard cave already popular with residents and visitors. These shafts tunnel almost 700 feet into the earth – most of their depths filled with water, and thus, pretty hard to fully explore.

Cavers Daniel Caron and Luc Le Blanc say they’ve suspected the existence of these caves since 2014, and spent much of 2017 exploring St. Léonard, which is already mapped, to find potential openings. They came across a narrow opening in the rock face that looked promising, but it was too small to enter, so they stuck a camera inside and took some photos of the chamber on the other side.

The cave explorers used hammers and cordless drills to break the wall down and get inside, finding a cavern with impressively high ceilings that leads to an underground lake. According to the Quebec Speleogical Society, Montreal was built right over this entire system without anyone ever realizing it was there, and Caron and Le Blanc may be the first humans ever to enter the newly-discovered areas.

Many cities all over the world are built right atop underground wonders, from quarries and catacombs to bunkers and smuggling tunnels, but the foundations of many others remain a mystery. Many of us likely walk over secret worlds every day without ever realizing it.

There’s a good chance that no one, other than an errant worker, will ever even see these highly symbolic (not to mention illegal) installations hidden far beneath the streets of Paris. Tucked into tunnels that have been disused for decades, an artist we’ll call EZ (who asked us to remain anonymous), has has created sculptural wonders with a furtive feel, each one requiring hours upon hours of investigative preparation as the artist slinks around the subterranean spaces to find locations that will be undisturbed as long as possible.

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“I place cigarette butts inside door locks, wedge things underneath the door, and place objects along hallways and passageways,” EZ says. “Then I come back later to see if they’re moved, and when. I also research the locations extensively, and try to see if any construction work is planned along the subway lines. I try and find out workers’ hours and those of security as well. I also plan an emergency exit, in case something goes wrong.”

The Paris-based urban explorer maps out these ideal spots and enters them at dawn, spending around ten hours at a time building his installations in place. Most are made using materials he finds within the tunnels, like branches, pallets, pipe, string and the remains of old structures. Most of his locations aren’t disclosed, but EZ says 2014’s Radeau échoué (Sunken Raft, below) was placed along a subway line, while Désenchantement (Disenchantment, above) occupied an underground room beneath the contemporary art space La Maison Rouge.

There’s definitely risk involved – the artist one spent three days in jail after he was caught in a restricted area, and has been escorted back above ground on other occasions. But EZ finds the whole process to be healing and restorative, telling the Creators Project, “I explore underground when I feel blue. It soothes me.”

The secretive nature of the process is a fitting complement to the work itself, which often evokes images of camps for refugees and the homeless. Accessed and utilized without permission, these often wasted spaces are temporary homes to surreal architectural creations, if not to the humans who could actually use them.

“The underworld is more fun,” says Luke O’Sullivan, the artist who painstakingly crafts stunning cityscape sculptures with intricate subterranean sections inspired by the seemingly never-ending underground worlds in early Nintendo games like Super Mario Bros. Working primarily in wood and salvaged materials, O’Sullivan creates surreal multi-level spaces with platforms , trapdoors, buckets and ladders. It’s easy to imagine Mario jumping from one area to the next inside, popping out of tunnels, racking up mushrooms and avoiding goombas.

“My work is about the intersection of built environments and subterranean systems,” says O’Sullivan in his artist statement. “Through the application of screen-printed drawings on wood, metal and other flat surfaces, I create architecturally based sculptures. Often inspired by dystopian and science fiction films, I combine recognizable architectural forms and impossible buildings to create diorama-esque works.”

The largest piece he’s completed, “Industry, Entropy,” measures ten feet long and took over three years to complete. The artist describes it as a “milestone piece.” This one is wider than it is tall, but others are like individual islands of towering structures that rise high above the surface and plunge deep below it.

Working in a restrained color palette, O’Sullivan keeps the above-ground sections of the cities relatively two-dimensional, hinting that the more detailed and literally well-rounded world beneath it is what’s really important. These subterranean areas seem full of secret functions, each one brimming with mysteries and begging to be explored. If only we could shrink ourselves down to climb around in them ourselves. See more on Instagram.

Starting in the basement of a home owned by a wealthy philanthropist in the 1700s, a network of tunnels descends into the earth beneath the city of Liverpool, their full extent still undiscovered even after fifteen years of exploration. Why did tobacco merchant Joseph Williamson start building them, and just how far do they go? Some people say they were meant to be the final refuge of a death cult in the event of the apocalypse, and the secretive nature of the tunnels don’t do much to refute that theory.

There are no records from Williamson’s time to give experts any clues, and over the centuries, the portions of the tunnels that were penetrated by the public were filled with trash and debris, creating quite a cleanup job for locals working to preserve them. The twisting labyrinth was forgotten for decades before their rediscovery in 2001, and a group called ‘Friends of Williamson’s Tunnels’ has been volunteering to dig them out ever since.

Known for his charity work, Williamson may have just initiated the project to provide work for the many local men who were unemployed after the Napoleonic wars. Some of the tunnels seem to have been built and then immediately bricked up. But this and other maze-like pathways that ultimately lead nowhere could also be an attempt to disguise the true breadth of the tunnel system.

Of course, the most obvious explanation is that Williamson was using them for illegal activity. Smuggling has been the main purpose of similar tunnels around the world, from the drug tunnels at the Mexican-California border to the human trafficking tunnels of Portland, Oregon. It’s impossible to say now whether these particular ones carried illicit goods, were envisioned as emergency bunkers or were perhaps a part of some grand plan to redevelop Liverpool.

The volunteers digging the tunnels have filled over 120 dumpsters with debris since they began, and they still have no idea how much more work is left to complete. Among it they’ve found all sorts of archaeological treasures, from pipes to ceramics. Many of these are now housed in the Liverpool Heritage Center, where excavated portions of the tunnels can be toured.