Original subtitles

Tom ward (narrates): A country village eerily empty

which hides a sad secret.

All of the citizens of this village

have just been made to disappear at a stroke.

A mysterious tower battered by the elements and scarred by war.

You're out here really in the middle of nowhere.

A town ravaged,

desolate and forgotten decaying in the desert.

Why on earth would anyone choose to build a town

in such a remote location?

And a disused railway deep beneath the streets of London.

There's actually a hidden system,

a hidden system of tunnels

that you don't get to see they're there.

Once they were some of the most advanced structures

and facilities on the planet,

at the cutting edge of design and construction.

Today they stand abandoned, contaminated and sometimes deadly.

But who built them and how

and why were they abandoned?

(Theme music)

On the south west coast of england

almost 200km from London

is what looks like a normal English country village.

But it's not.

The village pond looks like any other village pond in england

except there's no wildlife there.

There are no ducks, it's eerily empty.

(Rattles)

The feeling is very much

as though all of the citizens of this village

have just been made to disappear at a stroke.

(Eerie music)

Travel further in and it gets even stranger.

A few hundred yards from the village green

is a school that looks perfectly preserved.

The desks are still there, the books are still there,

it's laid out as if the children had only been there yesterday.

There are still pegs

with their names on out in the corridor.

It feels as if it's a school that's still being used

but from another age.

You get the feeling that it's break time

and the children have just gone through the door

and are running about outside playing.

The village church too, is in perfect condition.

The pew seats seem freshly polished.

And the stained glass windows are as immaculate

as when they were first installed.

And that's not all.

In the middle of the village there's an old white telephone box

which seems something of an oddity in this day and age

and even more odd is the local story

that even though it was disconnected decades ago it still rings.

(Telephone rings)

But other buildings hint at a darker past.

Such as the cottages

which are little more than empty shells.

And these are in an unusual state of disrepair,

the roofs have gone, the fittings have gone,

the windows have gone

but yet at the same time these wrecks,

these husks have been strengthened.

It's almost as though somebody is about to film a movie

about 1930s england.

Why on earth are these buildings like this?

How can you have

a little school room that looks intact,

a church that looks intact but a lot of ruined cottages?

What could have happened to leave the village

so completely abandoned?

To find out what's behind the mystery,

we need to go back to a single day

that would change the course of world war ii.

In 1943, britain was at war.

To win, the allies had to invade France

and liberate north west Europe from Nazi control.

The first phase was code named operation Neptune

but it's known to history but its legendary name d-day.

It was an enormous undertaking that would require

unprecedented planning and training

if it was to have any chance of success.

The scale of the preparations certainly overwhelms the mind.

Tens of thousands of troops found themselves billeted

mainly in the south of england

to be put through the intensive training

they'd need to make the invasion.

Very few of them knew when or where it would be made,

they just knew it was coming.

It was a daunting prospect for the British army.

They had to train vast numbers of recruits,

many of whom hadn't seen combat before

and they needed space and terrain and environments that were fitting

and that were like what they were going to face

when they arrived in France.

But what does all this have to do

with a small and isolated village in rural england,

a world away from the bullets and shells

and chaos of war.

By 1943 the south coast of england

had been transformed into an armed camp,

11 million acres, much of it farmland,

became air fields, camps and training grounds.

And even more land was needed

particularly to train British and American tank crews.

If you're training people to operate tanks

it's not enough to just learn how to drive it.

The really key thing is learning how to shoot it.

So, you need long distances to practice firing those shells

where you're not gonna hit anything you don't want to hit.

And this was the ideal location.

It was remote and situated close to a firing range.

It was the village of tyneham.

The only stumbling block

was that 200 people lived in the village.

How do you tell them they need to leave their homes,

their jobs and their neighbours for good?

Lynda price, a local historian,

has spoken to many former village residents.

The final blow

came in November, 1943.

And totally out of the blue, they all got a letter.

They came from a gentleman from southern command and on it,

he said that the area was needed for military training

and they had basically a month to get out.

It must have been heart breaking.

These were people who'd lived in this village for generations

and all of a sudden to be uprooted and told that you have to leave.

And they expected to come back,

you know, that's what's very poignant about it.

They thought the war would end and they would come back

and all would be as it was.

But why exactly

did the ministry of defence choose tyneham?

Tyneham was a backwater in a backwater.

I mean, it was practically off the map.

They didn't have electricity,

most of them didn't even have indoor plumbing.

People forget how primitive

the English countryside could be back in that era.

They lived in little cottages,

most of which were owned by the land owner,

in fact the whole estate was owned by the bond family

and most of these people,

their lives would have been tied into the bonds.

So, in some senses, it was already a way of life

that was passing or perhaps for most people even passed.

So, the inhabitants were simply ordered to leave

by the British government.

By why then is so much of the village destroyed

while other parts are almost perfectly preserved?

The army knew that the church was vulnerable to attack

in the run up to d-day.

They removed the heavy oak pulpit and the pews

and carefully transported the stained glass

to a place of safety.

Tyneham is now abandoned

although it hasn't been completely forgotten.

The sacrifices of the villagers certainly helped the allies

make a vital step towards final victory.

The morning of 6 June, 1944

was like no other the war had ever seen.

Over 150,000 English,

American, Canadian and other soldiers boarded ships,

vessels, barges of all descriptions and attacked the French coast.

By the time the battle there was over

and the forces were able to push down into France,

the course of the war had been changed forever.

D-Day was a resounding success

but the villagers weren't the only ones who'd made sacrifices.

Two and a half thousand us troops,

many of whom had trained at tyneham,

lost their lives on Omaha beach.

After the war tyneham continued to be used

as a training ground for tank crews.

And so, the villagers were never allowed back.

However in these more peaceful times,

the village is open to visitors.

When I look at tyneham,

what I think about is how much dislocation,

how much destruction,

what a human cost there is even to winning a war,

even to non-combatance.

The level of self sacrifice that was necessary

to conduct the kind of total war

that was required to defeat the Nazis,

that kind of effort boggles the modern mind.

Twenty seven kilometres west of mackinaw city

at the northern tip of lake Michigan in the usa

is a peculiar tower like structure.

A mountain,

a rock sticking out of a vast cold lake.

You're out here really in the middle of nowhere.

And here, standing out in the water

is this odd kind of half-broken down structure

that's kind of crumbling around the edges.

Sometimes dazzling sunshine reflects from the water

on to the concrete and brick.

But rubble and dead birds litter its interior.

It's made up of three sections which each contain a mystery.

What was enclosed in the caged top?

And the height of the tower itself,

height always creates a vantage point but for what?

Attack, defence, a warning?

Look closely

and a more perplexing picture emerges.

On the walls are large ominous looking cracks.

Inside everything's been stripped out

apart from strange metal piping.

And some say it is haunted by the ghost of a man

who met a mysterious end.

The amount of damage on a tower suggests

it's been weathered more than just harsh winters.

And although the pitted base may well be from crashing waves,

is there another reason why great chunks are missing?

I mean look at that, a remote tower

in the middle of nowhere in america,

the last thing you expect to see is battle damage.

The roots of this strange story can be found in trade

and its importance to the Great Lakes

during the early 19th century.

Before america builds railways,

america's arteries are waterways.

The Great Lakes and the great canals

are what enables america to become an industrial powerhouse.

The Great Lakes together form

really a massive inland sea

for the United States and Canada.

And this waterway was important for shipping goods

so, you had fur pelts

then later, grain, iron ore,

all these products moving through this area dating from really,

you know, very early in the history of North America.

The Great Lakes connect the mid west with the Atlantic ocean.

Measured by total area,

they are the largest group of freshwater lakes on earth.

And by volume, they contain 21% of the world's surface fresh water.

Their total surface area measures nearly 3/4 of a million kilometres.

The Great Lakes are noted

for their extraordinary sea-like characteristics.

Here, rolling waves,

powerful winds and strong currents are common.

In fact, according to Chris west

who has sailed these waters for most of his life,

they are more like inland seas.

You think of lake Michigan, we can't see the other side.

You can travel from Chicago which is the southernmost point

to the upper peninsula of Michigan

and that's about 400 or 500 miles long.

So, it's a very big area of water.

However, at the straits of mackinac,

it narrows dramatically.

This is a major shipping Lane

which connects lake Michigan to lake huron.

But it is just 5.5km wide

with treacherous underwater currents which have often proved fatal.

If you're on a ship in the ocean

and a storm comes up and blows you a few miles off course,

you've got thousands of miles of ocean around you.

But if that happens in lake Michigan,

it's relatively narrow.

There's all these shallows.

You could be on the rocks in just a few minutes.

In the straits of mackinac there's over 80 shipwrecks.

This was the most dangerous spot,

they were coming up from Chicago

and they were making the corner to go into the straits of mackinac

and there was this spot that there was 4 feet of water

so these ships just kept running aground.

The us government decided it had to intervene,

to try and put a stop to the tragic accidents.

This was how the waugoshance lighthouse.

But how did they go about building

a structure as impressive as this in the middle of such a huge lake?

You start with a wooden crib structure

that rests on the bottom

and then you bring out rocks on barges

and you fill this crib with rocks.

Now, you have a stable structure that you can build on top of.

It's a feat today to build something like that.

And obviously back in the day, no power tools.

It was nails and, you know, big hammers and pulleys

and so, it was very labour-intensive to do something like that.

The lighthouse began operating in 1851.

It was a lifeline to all of the maritime traffic.

This gave them their road map

of how to get through the straits of mackinac.

So, it was hugely important for the area.

Its light attended by a keeper and his assistant

was visible for miles around.

The lighthouse keeper's job was both incredibly boring

and incredibly important at the same time.

You had to keep that light working.

You had to keep it going.

It was a pretty remote life.

The light keepers would go out when the ice went out

which... April-ish they would be out there until November.

And so, they're there for essentially seven months

by themselves not seeing another human.

The light was generated by an oil burning lamp

which required constant attention and refuelling.

When the light was made invisible by mist and fog,

a fog horn was used to warn ships.

It was powered by steam

and it worked by emitting a low frequency warning

through two huge metal pipes.

(Horn hums)

These are the stove pipes.

They were for the fog signal for the light house.

They were in the fog signal building.

You can still see the holes in the ceiling

of the fog signal building where these went through.

So, down these steps

brings you into the basement of the living quarters.

And so, down here there would have been boilers

and there would have been supplies for the lighthouse keepers.

Then first floor would have been living room, a kitchen.

Then you go up to the top floors

and that's where the bedrooms of the keepers would have been.

One of the waugoshance lighthouse keepers

was a hard drinking man called John Herman,

a notorious practical joker.

One night, Herman drunkenly

locked his assistant into the lantern room.

It was the last prank he ever played.

John had had a few

and John decided he should lock the door on him.

While all this was happening, a storm came up.

Unfortunately, John fell off the side of the lighthouse.

(Water splashes)

And ever since then,

he's been the notorious John Herman of waugoshance lighthouse.

The assistant managed to escape

but John Herman disappeared beneath the waters forever.

Legend has it that his ghost now haunts the lighthouse.

But what caused it to finally be abandoned?

As shipping through the Great Lakes began to become even heavier

and the boats got bigger, and they required a deeper draft,

they rowed lower in the water, that channel was no longer adequate.

There was another channel farther out into the lake

that was much deeper

so they built another lighthouse to Mark that channel

and the waugoshance lighthouse became kind of obsolete.

In 1912, the last keepers left the lighthouse for good.

But that wasn't the end of the story.

Waugoshance would play an unlikely part

in the development of a top secret super weapon

during world war ii.

The us Navy starts to develop

a remotely piloted aircraft, a drone,

that can drop bombs

and sink Japanese warships.

These early drones were piloted

from another aircraft

and the operators were able to steer them using radio control...

Looking through early television cameras

to see what that drone can see.

(Explodes)

The project was top secret.

It was called stag one.

They need to practice.

Guess what they picked?

Our little lighthouse sitting out there, you know.

It no longer was needed as a lighthouse

but it made a fantastic target.

They bombed the hell out of it.

This is one of the remnants of the bombing run.

You can see the amount of impact that it had

because this is 1/4 inch thick boiler plate

and then you have

about 2.5-3 feet of brick used to come out to here,

come out to where the boiler plate is right here.

So, when the bomb hit, pretty intense impact for it

to be able to take 2.5 feet or 3 feet of brick

and just kind of blow it out of there.

After the war ended,

there was no further use for the lighthouse

and it was eventually completely abandoned for good.

Today, it's home only to the ghost of John Herman...

Although there are plans to restore it.

So, here's this lighthouse

that stood there protecting the ships for so long

and then perform this important service

during world war ii.

And let's not let it just crumble into the lake.

In the extreme north west of Chile, close to its border with Peru,

there is a strange almost apocalyptic site.

It looks almost like some kind of film set

for an old western movie.

Everything's somewhat decayed.

Everything's rusty but it's still standing

and in other words, it seems very much untouched.

There's something unnerving about the row after row of houses.

What's really strange is where the town is located.

It's in the middle of the desert, miles away from anywhere.

Why on earth would anyone choose

to build a town in such a remote location?

There is a swimming pool long ago emptied of water...

With a diving board last used years ago...

And a ghostly playground

that will never again hear the sound of children's laughter.

Any time you see a place that had been inhabited by humans

and then it looks as if they suddenly left.

It gives you an unsettled feeling.

It gives you a sense of dread,

maybe something terrible happened here.

But journey beyond the houses and the buildings suddenly change.

You see, sort of, rusted bits of machinery.

There's clearly an engineering type of feel to it.

There's a rusted locomotive

and tracks that lead to what looks like an old factory.

Whatever happened here

was clearly an extensive and complex industrial operation.

But what was it?

What's even more confusing

is that most of the machinery was made by British manufacturers.

What was its function

and how has it ended up here in this remote part of Chile?

What you're seeing is the global economy

dropped down here into this remote desert.

Why is it all here?

Clues lie in the population explosion

that happened in the new industrial world

towards the end of the 19th century...

And in the need to feed huge numbers of people.

For thousands of years,

farmers grew their crops using whatever nutrients were on hand.

The manure from animals was collected

and that was good enough for a time.

But in the 19th century, they started to discover

that you could add additional chemicals to the soil

and make your farms dramatically more productive.

Large deposits of a mineral

that would revolutionise food production

and transform the fortunes of Chile

were discovered here in the atacama desert.

The atacama covers a 1,000km strip of land

to the west of the andes mountains,

and it's the driest desert in the world.

Some areas have an almost other worldly appearance,

so much so that the soil has drawn comparisons

with the surface of Mars.

One 16th century traveller

described the atacama desert as "without men,

"where there is not a bird "nor a beast

nor a tree nor any vegetation."

The arid barren landscape

has barely changed over the centuries.

However, one mineral was in plentiful supply.

This part of the atacama desert

is rich in a mineral that then was called saltpetre.

Saltpetre is a name for various forms of nitrate.

And this is a chemical

that essentially can work as fertiliser

once you break it down.

And there's very few places on the planet

where you can actually find this material,

this particular type of mineral

in effect just lying on the ground

very, very easy to excavate and mine.

Saltpetre, then known as white gold,

was in effect Chile's gold rush.

It accounted for 80% of Chile's exports.

The country's economy depended on it.

At the time, the northern part of Chile

and southern part of Peru

were actually the main provider of saltpetre

to the whole of the world.

Small mining villages were springing up all over the place

to take advantage of this.

Humberstone was one of those villages.

It's situated in that bleak desert

almost 1,500km from the Chilean capital of Santiago

and it was the centre

of the country's saltpetre production.

But why does it have

the very English sounding name of humberstone?

James humberstone was an englishman

who arrived in this area in the late 19th century

with a better way to process the saltpetre.

He took over the nitrate production facilities.

And he did it so well that within a couple of years,

he'd doubled the productivity.

Patricio Diaz valencia is director of investigations at humberstone

and an expert on its history.

The people who used to work here came from different countries.

They were Bolivian.

They were Argentinean.

They were Chilean.

They all came together in this area and created a new society.

Humberstone was a company town

the 3,700 men, women and children who lived there owned nothing,

certainly not their houses or even their furniture.

But these conditions were common in Chile,

and violent worker strikes were not unknown.

Men in humberstone were paid in tokens

that could only be exchanged in the local general store.

It was a harsh tough life.

Tokens were paid according to the effort invested.

There was a minimum.

For example, in order to receive the minimum wage

so they could live,

they had to load at least two wagons every day.

This took approximately 12 hours each day.

Digging for saltpetre was a gruelling business.

The workers were outside all day in the blistering sun

with little water or shade.

They scrape up this powdery substance

off the desert floor, crush it, boil it

and then they went through a series of processes

that would separate out the valuable parts

of these compounds from everything else.

All day long,

crushers ground the nitrate-rich crust of the desert.

That was then dissolved in boilers forming a toxic soup of chemicals

from which they'd eventually extract the nitrate.

Can you imagine what a brutal job this must have been working

in one of the hottest, driest places,

boiling these nasty...

(Laughs)

You know, chemicals all day.

The chimneys would have been bellowing black smoke.

The boilers would have been seeping out hot steam.

And the sheer danger of the work of mining was ever-present.

So, what caused the town to be abandoned?

Was it because of an industrial disaster

or some other calamitous event?

Two things killed humberstone, war and technology.

During world war I, the British blockaded the shipments

of saltpetre from Chile going to Germany.

And at the same time German scientists developed

synthetic ways of creating fertiliser

and so, had no need to have saltpetre shipped

from the other side of the planet.

The industry collapsed and so, that was the end of humberstone.

The houses and factories were abandoned

and the people simply upped and left the town.

No-one has lived or worked here for half a century.

The town's survival is a freak economic accident.

After the last inhabitant left, it was sold to a developer

but he went bust before he was able to do anything

with the town to strip out all the bits

that he was going to sell.

As a result, it's been preserved by the dry desert air

and is now a United Nations world heritage site.

You can see exactly how these people lived.

You see also how their fortunes were on the flick of a coin,

because once the need for that mining left, they left.

But they left everything in place.

In england, beneath the busy bustling streets of London,

lies a secret subterranean world.

There's actually a hidden system, a hidden system of tunnels

that you don't get to see they're there.

What are they and what were they used for?

It looks like these things haven't been used

for quite some time.

You've got stalactites hanging from the ceiling,

you've got bits of water flowing along the bottom,

and then there's water

kind of dripping down the sides of the tunnel as well.

So, it's quite a spooky place to be.

It looks like a little hobbit railroad.

The track is very narrow, only about 2 feet across.

The ceilings are very low.

So, it's really kind of mysterious.

Who made these little miniaturised tunnels?

These twisting tracks

stretching far into the distance provide clues.

As you move around the tunnels,

you suddenly come into open spaces, actual stations.

So, there are stations in these tunnel networks.

Away from the stations,

there are more signs of activity but from long ago.

There's empty filing cabinets.

There's desks with old broken telephones on.

When you see overalls draped over things,

your telephones, kiosks, everything,

it's almost as though this place was abandoned fairly quickly.

It seems like there wasn't enough time to remove everything

and clear out when you left.

If it was an area that was more accessible,

you know, scavengers would have come in,

people might have come in and taken stuff.

You'd see graffiti.

But because these tunnels are really quite deep,

they really did not get picked over or stripped.

What was it?

Who worked here?

And why has it been left abandoned?

(Eerie music)

(Suspenseful music)

In the early 20th century, most people communicated by letter.

Smooth delivery of mail was critical particularly to London,

the country's financial hub.

So, if you have a legal contract or you have a policy,

you have a negotiation, being able to move those documents

around the city quickly

was part of the key to London's economic dominance.

It could take several hours to deliver mail

from one part of the city to another.

Something had to be done to speed things up.

But that was easier said than done.

By the end of the edwardian era,

the population of London had risen to almost 7 million people,

1 in every 5 britons lived in the city.

The fact was that the streets of London

were becoming more and more crowded.

Although this teaming Metropolis

was still blighted by grinding poverty,

this was a time of tremendous economic growth for the city.

And the mail system had to play its part.

In 1909, a committee was set up

to look into ways of solving the problem.

If you think about the streets of London back then,

they were really busy.

There were horse carriages and animals

and all sorts of things happening up at street level.

So, to find somewhere

where they could very quickly and efficiently move

really important documents around,

they had to go underground.

And this was the result, an underground rail track

stretching 10km across London, the mail rail.

It was a revolutionary piece of engineering.

But the constructors faced many problems and challenges.

London is really built on a big swamp, an estuary.

And so, as a result, when you start digging underground,

it's very damp, muddy, Sandy, silty.

And they in fact encountered

one of the largest subterranean rivers in the area

called the fleet river.

And so, water ingressing into the tunnels

was a big problem during engineering.

Ray middlesworth, one of the last engineers here

is well aware of the dangers they faced.

There were incidents when they were digging the tunnels

and many workers had to run for their lives

to get away from the water bursting through.

But ways had to be found to complete this vital project.

One of the things they did was to add air locks

and then they pushed air into those sections of tunnel

to keep the water out.

They also used flood gates in portions of the tunnels,

so if water did come in,

they could isolate those sections of tunnel

which were full of water and then quickly pump the water out.

In 1927, the mail rail was finally ready for service.

It was the only one of its kind in the world.

These trains do not have drivers.

They don't have engineers.

So, it's really the first

driverless electric vehicle system in the world.

The system meant they could speed mail

right across London avoiding the congestion

on the streets above.

The new track connected Paddington in the west

with whitechapel station in the east

and linked up six other sorting offices along the way.

A conveyor belt linked the tunnels

to the mainline platforms at liverpool street and Paddington.

Ray remembers trying to keep the system working smoothly

while processing up to 4 million letters a day.

You had to work under a lot of time pressure

because once the trains stopped,

they would start backing away all the way round the system.

And the whole rail network would grind to a halt.

This is battery loco number two, nicknamed 'the banana'

because of its bright-yellow colour scheme,

which we used these locos when the railway was shut down

to retrieve broken down trains

and do maintenance work on the track in the weekends.

This was built in 1927.

It's still serviceable.

Sturdy beast built by English electric,

weighs 7.5 tonnes.

And I must have jumped in and out of that cab

about 1,000 times during my career.

Although the engineers somehow kept the mail rail running,

the threat of flooding was ever-present.

This is one of the four flood gates installed

to seal off the main tunnel from the station

in case there was a deadly flood

and we needed to pump our water out.

It was mechanical in operation

so that it could be relied to operate in any circumstances.

Very sturdy.

(Knocks)

The mail rail ran beneath the streets of central London

until 2003.

Why is it now deserted?

By the beginning of the 21st century,

the mail rail had simply become too expensive to run.

It was delivering mail around London for some 80-odd years.

And its demise, well, we had the Internet age.

We were no longer sending so many letters.

There was also a much better infrastructure above ground.

So, it really lost its economic importance.

On the last day of service,

I was one of the engineers on duty that day

and it was my job to shut down the power at mount pleasant.

It was historic, we had a job to do, but we all knew what it meant.

It was the coming to the end of an era

after 76 years. Very sad.

Today, part of the track still lives on

as a tourist ride and museum.

And I think that that's just fantastic

to preserve that really important legacy.

And the real beauty of the royal mail

underground delivery system

was that it was happening with many people

being completely unaware that it was there.

We didn't really know

that letters were actually moving beneath our feet.

Now, they lie abandoned,

but once, they were at the cutting edge of engineering.

There are echoes from history in these decaying structures.

They remind us of terror and war,

but also of great innovation and human endeavour.

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