The mystery of a room and passageway with bricked up windows and doors discovered underneath a Liverpool street may never be solved.
The discovery was made by train driver and trustee of the Friends of Willamson Tunnels, Chris Iles, in the early 2000s. An underground room and passageway underneath Renshaw Street was unearthed following a chance conversation with a pub landlord.
Chris, who is also a train driver, spoke about his fascinating discovery which happened 20 years ago. He told the ECHO : "We used to drink in The Dispensary, and we spoke to the manager.
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"I'm involved with the Williamson Tunnels so everything below ground fascinates me. We asked him what was underneath his pub.
"He said we've not really got anything, we've just got a cellar room - but rumour has it there's something below us. So we were like, oh, that sounds fascinating.
"I asked around and I remember a building next to the pub which, if my memory serves me right, it was an old tyre fitting garage or car maintenance garage." The building that Chris is referring to stood next to the pub until it was demolished in 2017 while Renshaw Street Food Market now occupies the site.
Chris said: "One Sunday, we were there and we noticed the building had been broken into so we popped our heads in and the building was just empty. We had a look and there were these metal grids in the ground, which you would expect to see for drains and things like that, but when we lifted one of them it went down into this square room.
"This square room was full of rubbish which had been dumped down there over the years. Of course, we had no means of getting in there that particular day so we went back, I think the following week, and took a ladder with us and went down - and that's when the photographs were taken."
The images that Chris took show Chris and his team descending down a ladder into the square room underneath the garage. And arch way in the room leads off to a separate tunnel.
The photographs also show a number of bricked up windows and doors in the room and passageway. Chris said: "It was fascinating because you dropped down through the hole in the floor in the garage into this square room.
"In the top corner there's definitely a bricked-up tunnel. At one point we did actually remove a brick just to see if we could see through but it was full of rubble.
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"It wasn't an empty tunnel, it had been filled. Now whether it was filled for its entire length, no idea.
"It might have just been filled the first few feet to stop people from going in and then bricked up. Of course we were thinking, where does this tunnel go?"
Chris added: "The strange thing about the passage, there was windows and doors, although they'd been bricked up, with stone window sills. When you were in that passage, if you could image looking through the windows or going through the doors bricked up, you would have been walking out underneath Renshaw Street itself, underneath the road.
Click the gallery below to explore the mysterious subterranean world beneath Renshaw Street
"So, there was something beneath there, now what was it? I don't know the history of what we found but was the street level different years ago? Why you would have windows and doors like that below ground is quite strange."
Part of the answer may have come a few years later, this time close to another pub not far away, the Fly In The Loaf on Hardman Street. Chris said: "There was a little old cottage type place on the other side of the road.
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"It had got knocked down, and that's where the final couple of photographs were taken. You can see behind the staircase, there's the tunnel. So clearly, that tunnel comes all the way up the street."
To this day, Chris says he doesn't really know what the original use of the room and passageway was, or where the bricked up doorways and windows led to. However, it's likely the discovery will remain a mystery as the old building above the tunnel has since been demolished and a new building has been erected on site.
Do you know of any hidden rooms or tunnels in or underneath the city that aren't commonly known? Let us know in the comments section below.
Chris said: "I imagine they've probably filled it in. It's probably now gone with the foundations for the new building [in place]," adding: "But it would be interesting to know."
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