Discover the hidden history of an underground village in East London. Join Siddy Holloway, presenter of Secrets of the Underground and wartime Blitz survivor Ray as we celebrate a unique wartime community.

From the Library With Love

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101 years ago today a large crowd assembled on a crisp October morning in 1922, when Bethnal Green’s first permanent public library opened its doors in a handsome red brick building in Barmy Park. The philanthropy of Scottish businessman Andrew Carnegie provided £20,000, and the remaining £16,000 was raised by the local authority.
‘The council was handing down to future generations a legacy which would enable them to obtain knowledge and sweep away misery and poverty,’ said the Mayor in his opening speech. This was a thinly veiled reference to the fact that only two years previously, an asylum stood on that site.
Bethnal ‘madhouse’ operated for 120 years in Bethnal Green, East London, and was notorious for its cruel treatment. Even today, most East Enders still refer to the grounds around the library as Barmy Park. Shockingly, the asylum only closed in 1920.
Two years later, the library opened in what had been the male block. The disturbingly cruel incarceration of the mentally ill, replaced with learning and literacy. What a message of hope that must have sent to the community.
But trials loomed ahead. Eighteen years after the library opened, in September 1940, a bomb crashed through the roof of the adult lending library at 5.55 p.m. on what would later be known as ‘Black Saturday’, the start of the Blitz. What had been an orderly and well-equipped library became in a split second a scene of destruction.
And here the story takes a surprising twist. Rather than simply hurrying for the nearest shelter, the borough librarian, George F. Vale and his deputy, Stanley Snaith, calmly pulled a tarpaulin over the shattered glass dome roof and set about planning a pioneering social experiment that would transform the lives of wartime Londoners.
Bethnal Green Underground was a half-completed stop on the Central Line when war broke out. Builders were working on connecting it to Liverpool Street, but from 1939 it had been locked up and left to the rats. One week after the Blitz began, East Enders defied Churchill’s orders not to shelter in Tube stations and claimed their right to safety. At seventy-eight feet below ground, it was one of the few really safe places to shelter in Bethnal Green and was referred to by locals as an ‘Iron Lung’.
Over the course of the next twelve months, it was transformed into a fully-functioning subterranean community with an astonishing array of facilities. Metal triple bunks sleeping up to 5,000 stretched three-quarters of a mile up the eastbound tunnel. A shelter ticket reserved you a bunk.
There was a three-hundred-seat shelter theatre with a stage and spotlights, which hosted opera and ballet, a cafe, doctor’s quarters and a wartime nursery, which enabled newly enfranchised women to go out to work. But here’s the best part – there was a library!
I love surprises in history and finding out about George and Stanley’s secret underground library, built over the boarded-up tracks of the westbound tunnel, felt like nothing short of magic.
100 years on from the library’s opening, on October 13th 2022, I launched my novel, The Little Wartime Library, in Bethnal Green Library and I was joined by some very special guests.
No one knows more about the complex labyrinth of Tube tunnels that run beneath our feet than

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