Guardian Underground Telephone Exchange

Here is a 'working paper' draft of an article on the Cold War era underground telecommunications infrastructure in central Manchester. It was co-written with Richard Brook and derived from a chapter in our 2012 Infra_MANC exhibition catalogue. The article has been accept for publication by the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society but might take a good few months (or longer?) before the next issue of their Transactions gets released.

A plan Richard drew of the central cable and equipment tunnels lying under China Town in the city centre is shown above. It is quite an extensive underground space, as indicated by the photograph below showing the distances to the ends of the cable tunnels from the central core. More historic photos of the construction of the Guardian Exchange in the 1950s can be seen on George Coney's useful Cold War History in Manchester web pages.  

A view of the Guardian cable tunnels, 

taken by English Heritage in 1998.