Kingsway telephone exchange
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- Note: This site should not be confused with Kingsway tramway subway
Kingsway telephone exchange was a Cold War-era hardened telephone exchange underneath High Holborn in London.
It was built as a deep-level shelter underneath Chancery Lane tube station in the early 1940s. Like many of the deep level shelters it was not used for its intended purpose (an air raid shelter) and was used as a government communications centre.
The site was given to the General Post Office (GPO) in 1949. The Post Office was then responsible for telephones as well as postage. The two-tunnel shelter was extended by the addition of four tunnels at right-angles to the originals. It was completed by 1954.
In 1956 it became the termination point for the first transatlantic telephone cable - TAT1.
Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, Kingsway Trunk Switching Centre (as it was called) was a trunk switching centre and repeater station with Post Office engineering staff totalling over 200 at its peak. Also located on site was the Radio Interference Investigation Group, whose function was to prevent north/central London TV viewers and radio listeners from suffering interference to their service from external sources such as thermostats, fluorescent tubes and injection moulding equipment. The country's first Radiopaging terminal was also installed on this site in the 1970s.
The site had a staff restaurant, tea bar, games room and licensed bar (claiming to be the deepest bar, at approximately 200 feet below street level, located in the UK).
An artesian well and rations to maintain several hundred people for many months ensured a safe environment in case of nuclear attack.
By the early 1980s the site was subject to a phased closure after large quantites of blue asbestos was found on the site.
By 1995 only the main distribution frame was still in service. This reportedly has been removed.
[edit] Entrances
Kingsway Telephone Exchange had three entrances. One (still existing) is next to a shopfront at 32 High Holborn. Another is a goods lift on Furnival Street. The third one, a complex of ventilation towers and a passenger lift at Tooks Court, was demolished in 2001.
