Joseph Williamson & His Unique Underground Project

By Margaret Brecknell

For nearly two centuries few outside the Edge Hill district of Liverpool knew of the existence of a network of tunnels and underground caverns, hidden far out of sight underneath the city’s streets, until in the last decade of the 20th century a group of volunteers began a painstaking excavation project to uncover them.

Such is the scale of the task that the project is still ongoing today and many questions remain as to why they were constructed in the first place. However, thanks to the work of those dedicated volunteers, the tunnels have now become a popular tourist attraction and even featured in the most recent series of the popular BBC TV sci-fi drama, Doctor Who.

The man responsible for this mysterious underground network of tunnels was Joseph Williamson, an early 19th-century Liverpool businessman and philanthropist. Details regarding his early life remain sketchy, but research undertaken by the Williamson Tunnels Heritage Centre suggests that he was born in March 1769 in a small village close to the Yorkshire town of Barnsley. Whilst he was still a young child, the Williamsons moved to Warrington.

At possibly as young as eleven years old, Joseph Williamson left the family home and began employment with Richard Tate, who owned a tobacco and snuff business close to Liverpool city centre. In 1787 Tate died and his son, Thomas, took control of the business. Williamson appears to have made a good impression and was steadily promoted through the ranks. At the same time he also set up his own business in partnership with Joseph Leigh.

Williamson’s progress was confirmed when, in 1802, he married Thomas Tate’s sister, Elizabeth. Within the year he purchased the Tate family business and merged it with his own concern.

In around 1805 the now affluent businessman bought an area of land, which had previously been the site of an old sandstone quarry, on Mason Street in the Edge Hill district of the city. Edge Hill was still largely undeveloped as a residential area when Williamson and his wife moved into their new home on Mason Street, but he soon commenced building more houses there. The properties were impressive and aimed at the more affluent members of society, like Williamson himself, each with its own cellar and large garden.

From then onwards the mystery begins to deepen. At some point the labourers, which Williamson had employed whilst engaged in property development, were instructed to begin excavating tunnels out of the sandstone underneath the houses. The reasons for creating what became an extensive network of underground tunnels and caverns remain unclear.

The most widely held belief is that Williamson instructed his labourers to work on the project for philanthropic reasons as a means of keeping them in work. Liverpool’s population was rapidly expanding at the time and there were not enough jobs to go round, particularly following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1816 when even more unemployed men returned to the city. Some of the architectural features which have been discovered underground by modern excavators appears almost too intricate in detail for structures which would never see the light of the day, suggesting that the labourers were receiving training which would enable them to find employment elsewhere in the future.

This theory was first put forward only a few years after Williamson’s death by a local historian called James Stonehouse, who claimed, “The industrious poor of Edge Hill found in Williamson a ready friend in time of need”. He wrote of the tunnels in Excavations at Edge Hill that, “Here we see an astonishing instance of the application of vast labour, without use, immense expenses incurred without hope or intention seemingly of return, and if we accept the asserted reason of the late Mr Williamson that these works were carried out for the sole purpose of employing the necessitous poor, at a time of great need, we have a stupendous work – without perceptible motive – without plan, meaning, reason or form”.

Stonehouse later proceeded to describe how Williamson kept his tunnels “hidden from the eye of the curious”, adding that, “He took no visible pride in showing them; in fact he was very chary in allowing anybody to inspect them”. Williamson is, in general, portrayed by Stonehouse as an eccentric character, with the writer stating at one point that, “There are so many curious anecdotes about him current at Edge Hill that it is difficult to select the most curious, when all exhibit the singularity of the man. A volume might be filled with his sayings and doings”.

Because of Williamson’s reputation for eccentric behaviour and the lack of explanation from him personally regarding the purpose of his underground excavations, other more fanciful reasons for their existence have emerged

over the years. One theory suggests that Williamson was a member of an extremist religious sect that feared the end of the world was nigh and the tunnels were built to provide a sanctuary for himself, his family and friends when the apocalypse struck. The storyline featuring Williamson and his tunnels in the recent Doctor Who series alluded to this theory. However, in reality, Williamson is known to have regularly worshipped at his local church, St Thomas, and not a shred of evidence exists to support this far-fetched claim.

It has also been suggested that the tunnels were created to provide secret passages in and out of buildings in Edge Hill, implying, perhaps, that Williamson was engaged in covert activities such as smuggling.

The businessman did not legally have the right to quarry the large amounts of sandstone which lay beneath his Edge Hill land, so, alternatively, he may have been engaged in illegal quarrying, possibly swapping the sandstone which was extracted by the excavations for the bricks he needed to build houses above ground.

Whatever the explanation, Williamson is said to have continued to employ men to expand the underground network of tunnels and caverns ever further right up until his death in May 1840, at which point the project was halted immediately.

The tunnels soon began to fall into a state of disrepair. They were used for dumping refuse, added to which over time they began to fill with large stagnant pools of water. Even when James Stonehouse went down to investigate the underground excavations only a few years after Williamson’s death, he described “the fetid stagnant water which throws up miasmatic odours” and “the innumerable loads of rubbish” that had been thrown into the tunnels, “filling up some, blocking up others, and rendering others impassable”. When, later in the 19th century, some of the properties on Mason Street were demolished, the rubble was purposely used to fill in the tunnels by Liverpool Corporation after local residents complained of the smell. Modern experts believe this may, in fact, have helped to save some of the tunnels from falling in on themselves and preserved them for posterity.

Since the modern excavation project began some 20 years ago, the tunnels and underground caverns beneath this corner of Liverpool have once again started to reveal their secrets. Discoveries include a huge chamber, nicknamed “the banqueting hall”, which measures some 64 feet long, 14 feet wide and 27 feet high. In contrast, some of the tunnels are only 4 feet wide and 6 feet high. Many of the underground passages are still blocked with rubble and inaccessible,

The items once viewed as everyday rubbish and discarded in the tunnels by later Victorian residents have also provided archaeologists with a valuable insight into the social history of the period.

Much remains to be discovered about Williamson’s mysterious underground complex of tunnels and caverns, but the mystery surrounding how much more remains to be uncovered and the reason for their existence only adds to their appeal for modern day conspiracy theorists. May be one day all of Williamson’s secrets may be revealed, but for now it is sufficient to admire what we already know about this unique visitor attraction beneath the streets of Liverpool. 

Above: Banqueting Hall of Joseph Williamson’s house. Photo Credit: Kyle May/CC BY-SA 4.0