Going Underground – digging out the Williamson Tunnels
Volunteer diggers in Liverpool have excavated around 2,000 tons of rubble to uncover part of the mysterious underground labyrinth known as the Williamson Tunnels. Nicknamed ‘The Mole of Edge Hill’, Joseph Williamson was a wealthy tobacco merchant who, in the early 1800s , paid hundreds of unemployed men to dig seemly pointless tunnels under Edge Hill in Liverpool. Legend has it that this was a vast ‘job creation scheme’ for soldiers returning from the Napoleonic Wars. After Williamson’s death in 1840, the underground structures were gradually filled in and forgotten about. Until the 1990s when local heritage enthusiasts began to campaign to protect, preserve and restore what remained of the underground network. In 1999 the Friends of Williamson’s Tunnels group rediscovered a previously lost section of the caverns. After many years of struggle, the group managed to obtain a lease on the site and over a four year period a team of volunteer diggers have now revealed this deep section of the Williamson Tunnels.
A 50-minute DVD detailing the full history of Joseph Williamson’s life and his mysterious tunnel network can be bought from the Friends of Williamson’s Tunnels at
News of the campaign to restore the Tunnels is at
Tradition Films specializes in documentary and local history films
