The Mystery of Subterranean Selfridges: A Summary

A couple of 'meaningful' coincidences in the last week have alerted me to the fact that I should update the blog post on the alleged Victorian street beneath Selfridges. It's by far the most visited post and the way it's laid out is rather confusing and cluttered. So, here is an attempt to present the material in a more logical way with some added comments in the light of new material.

It was first posted on 10 April 2013.

At the talk for the South East London Folklore Society last week an audience question came up yet again about the existence of a perfectly preserved Victorian street of shops somewhere beneath Oxford Street. I think that the first time this came to my notice was when I was asked about it by Robert Elms during my first appearance on his radio show c.2001; at the time I honestly professed to know nothing about it and the whole thing seemed pretty absurd to me. It has since resurfaced (so to speak) on numerous occasions. I did say at the SELFS talk that I would look into this tale one more time and put my findings on the blog. The result has turned out to be more interesting than I might have thought.

Searching on the internet you can find a number of threads devoted to this topic. On one for example someone poses the question:

'Does anybody know anything about the supposed Victorian High Street underneath the present Oxford Street? Evidently Oxford St was raised up years ago but there is a tunnel underneath where the original cobbled road still stands and the part facias [sic] of Victorian shops. Or is this just an urban myth?'

In my Folklore of London book (2008) I wrote this [original text not the edited published version]:

‘Viewers of the 1991 Channel 4 Christmas Special The Ghosts of Oxford Street, directed and narrated by Malcolm McLaren were treated to a rare sight: behind a door in the basement of Selfridges there survives a complete underground Victorian street, perfectly preserved, with period frontages intact, supposedly lying directly beneath the modern street above. This piece of trickery has since entered London’s subterranean folklore and references to it continue to appear in magazines and on websites.’ 

My information was taken from various discussions about the film on the internet; perhaps naively I assumed that one or two of these participants had actually viewed it and remembered it accurately.

At the time that I was writing my folklore book I tried to obtain a copy of The Ghosts of London but it wasn't out on dvd and didn't appear on You Tube or anything similar; nobody I knew had recorded it. Last week, however, another audience member told me that it could now be seen on Channel 4’s tv on demand website here. So yesterday I finally managed to see this intermittently entertaining former rarity (with a ridiculous performance from Leigh Bowery) on my laptop and guess what? I cannot find the scene filmed in a perfectly preserved street of Victorian shops under Oxford Street. 

Selfridge’s certainly features heavily (the whole of part 2 of the 54 minute film is devoted to it) and there is a scene where Tom Jones dressed in Edwardian [?] costume (as Gordon Selfridge presumably) descends on an escalator to a floor of the store where the staff are dressed in period clothes – Twenties-looking to me, although the displays and products are modern. Other scenes take place inside Regency/Victorian rooms or sets or outside modern Oxford Street shops.  

The main candidate for the street scene must be the section on Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859), played by John Altman, filmed in what looks like a set, dressed to signify decadent dilapidation, intended to represent shops, as an obviously non-authentic sign reads ‘Boots apothecary’. There are however no ‘perfectly preserved’ Victorian shop fronts, nothing to indicate that it lies beneath Selfridge's and, owing to the camera position, no view of a cobbled street. On the same thread mentioned above another contributor claims that:

‘John Altman who played Nick Cotton in Eastenders… was in a bit of the film apparently actually under Oxford Street where there still exists part of this Victorian Street…He claimed Malcolm McLaren let him through a hole in the basement of Selfridges.’  

In another scene the present-day (1991) McLaren chases an actor playing his younger self into the Eisenhower Centre secure storage facility in Chenies Street. The boy descends in an old-fashioned ‘cage’ lift to a dimly lit tunnel that could be part of the former deep level shelter beneath Goodge Street tube station (you can also hear a tube train in the background, although this could have been added in post-production). Security Archives appear in the credits, so it seems that this sequence was filmed within that facility.  

By a strange coincidence the deep level shelter was used by Eisenhower (in his capacity as Supreme Commander of COSSAC, later absorbed into SHAEF) and his officers for a period during the Second World War, after he had rejected an annexe of Selfridge’s at No.14 Duke Street W1 - ‘a sizeable steel and concrete structure blessed with deep basements running 45 feet down’ - which later housed the SIGSALY code-scrambling computer. 

It should also be borne in mind that the now defunct Mail Rail/Post Office Railway (opened 1927, closed 2003) runs around 70 feet down, just to the north of the section of Oxford Street on which Selfridge’s stands. The Central line, opened as the Central London Railway from Bank to Shepherd’s Bush on 30th July 1900, also runs under the bustling thoroughfare. All the above is covered in my book Subterranean City, beneath the streets of London (now - October 2020 - out of print and just waiting for an enterprising publisher to request an updated version).

My copy of The Twopenny Tube by Bruce & Croome (1996) says on p23: ‘The large store of Harry Gordon Selfridge was being built near Bond Street station in 1908 and opened on 15th March 1909. Selfridge used many innovative marketing initiatives, but his suggestion that Bond Street station be renamed Selfridge’s was cold shouldered by the railway.’  

I have never had a behind-the-scenes tour of Selfridge’s myself, but a reporter from Time Out who has, certainly did not uncover anything unusual, although it’s interesting that while she makes no mention of the ‘preserved street’ she does refer to an alleged ‘abandoned tube station’ (article posted on the Time Out website on 10 November 2006):

‘We start by heading down into the basements. Myths abound about this subterranean world and, sadly, most of them are just that. There is no abandoned tube station, though Selfridge did lobby to get an underground tunnel built from Bond Street station up into the store – and have the station renamed ‘Selfridges’. Neither was there a river running through it – though there was an artesian well that served the building for years.

There are two levels of basement beneath the lower-ground shop floor: the ‘sub’ and the ‘sub-sub’, descending 60 metres below street level. These are split into two more areas: the dry sub and sub-sub, and their ‘wet’ equivalents. The wet area, more dank than watery, is beneath the original building, while the dry is under the rear building, known as the SWOD (after the four streets – Somerset, Wigmore, Orchard and Duke – that once enclosed it). 

During WWII, the SWOD’s basement was used by 50 soldiers from the US Army Signal Corps; there were even visits from Eisenhower and Churchill. The building had one of the only secure telex lines, was safe from bombing, and was close to the US Embassy on Grosvenor Square. According to Jarvis, a tunnel was built from Selfridges to the embassy so that personnel could move between the two in safety. Interrogation cells for prisoners were hewn from the uneven space available.’ 

With reference to the last two sentences, do we have another folkloric ‘secret tunnel’ to add to the hundreds supposedly under London? This is the first time I've seen reference to a tunnel from Selfridge’s to the American Embassy, but as it was constructed during wartime, as many other similar tunnels and shelters were, it cannot be dismissed totally. Perhaps when the American Embassy site is vacated in 2017 more details will come to light. 

If you think about it logically, had this street really managed to survive intact, it is incredible that it has not been opened to the public as an attraction or 'vintage retail experience' – especially given its hugely busy and tourist-heavy location.

Could this now firmly established piece of subterranean folklore be based on a misremembering of a small part of the Ghosts of Oxford Street that was, as far as I know, only shown on the one occasion in 1991; the urban legend does not appear to predate that year (Robert Elms asked me about it ten years later). The film had not subsequently been readily available on video or dvd (although some people must have taped it presumably?) so this fascinating misinterpretation (possibly coupled with the John Altman comment –if indeed that was ever actually said - or deliberate misinformation from the arch-prankster and former Situationist McLaren) became known through word of mouth, programmes such as the Robert Elms show and the internet? I shall have to go with this theory for now.

On 10 April 2013 I added the following;

As I intend to talk about this topic tomorrow night at Kensington Central Library I thought it was about time that I asked Selfridge's Press Office about this long-standing rumour. They told me that it was  a myth started by the Ghosts of Oxford Street film, as I suspected. Funnily enough, a few months ago, I was emailed by someone at the City of Westminster Archives Centre who had been contacted by a man who swore that he had visited a street of shops beneath Selfridge's in his youth.

On 23 June 2015 I added:

During research for my next book [Secret Tunnels of England: Folklore & Fact] I found out that Selfridge's is adding to its underground domain:

'In 2004 Selfridges announced a multi-million pound refurbishment and expansion programme for the store, which will include the construction of a tunnel connecting it to the recently-acquired Nations House in Wigmore Street, probably for the use of its 3000 staff, rather than customers.' Iain Withers 'Selfridge's picks team for revamp of flagship Oxford Street store' Building 27 February 2014.

On 19 April 2016 I added:

The mystery of the Victorian street under Oxford Street deepens (perhaps). A fairly old online post that somehow eluded me previously states that in fact the remnant of Victorian shops could be found several levels below what was the Lilley & Skinner shoe shop at 356-360 Oxford Street (very close to Selfridge's) and it was this location that Malcolm McLaren used when filming the Ghosts of Oxford Street. The cobbled street gets a mention and we are also told that the council had a 'preservation order' on it. The building is now a branch of Forever 21. I shall endeavour to check this out as soon as I can.

Another personal account was given to me in the pub (so my recall may not be perfect) after the hugely successful Subterranean Saturday talks at Conway Hall on the 9th of this month. A man told me that in the late 1960s he had delivered some clothes to Selfridge's - he had to take them down to a basement area that had been dressed to resemble a Victorian street. 

Now this is all very possible: that period did start to become fashionable in the late 60s and it is understandable that a large department store would want to evoke a Dickensian/Victorian atmosphere, especially around Christmas. But surely this arrangement would not have survived for another 20 years or so, when the Ghosts of Oxford Street came to be filmed? 

Later, I tried contacting Forever 21 to ask about the lost street beneath their premises, but to no avail, so one day, as I happened to be in central London I visited the store on Oxford Street. I have no recollection of visiting the Lilley & Skinner shop that was once based there in my youth. The building has only one lower-ground floor - this was confirmed by a member of staff - there are no lower levels - at least not accessible these days, if there ever were. It is on one side of Stratford Place, a fascinating historical cul de sac and close to the route of the 'lost' river Tyburn. I couldn't use Bond Street station as the area adjacent to the store is being prepared for Crossrail. See Westminster City Council's site here - under Stratford Place - where you can download a pdf.

In October 2020 I found that the estimable Survey of London had recently published a volume devoted entirely to Oxford Street, which has made what I always thought rather a dull street (apart from the thousands of bustling pedestrians) come to life and is packed with interesting architectural detail, maps and lovely photographs old and new. There is a long section (pp179-206) devoted to Selfridge's and contains all the detail you would need about the ownership of the land, plans for construction, the building and fitting out of the department store and the various expansions over the decades. Nowhere, of course, is there a mention that during its construction it was decided to preserve a row of Victorian shops in its basement area. In fact the building stands on what was previously the London branch of furniture makers Gillow & Co, who occupied part of the site from 1769 to 1906. There is also a very comprehensive history of the store by Gordon Honeycombe, Selfridge's Seventy-Five Years of the Store 1909-1984 (Park Lane Press, 1984).

Another very interesting blog post suggests that an early Medieval cistern under Stratford Place next to Forever 21 (once Lilley & Skinner) may be responsible for the belief in an underground structure of some kind in the vicinity of Oxford Street. See here. There is also a comment from 2017 written by a lady who says that she worked at L&S and saw the famed subterranean street with her own eyes.

See also a follow-up post here with other eye-witness claims that the street really does exist.

It looks as if this one will run and run - although a medieval cistern - fascinating as it sounds - is not a street of well-preserved Victorian shops with a cobbled street, which is what the original story is all about. For the history of water supply in the area see The Lost Rivers of London and books by Tom Bolton amongst others.