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Hidden Underground City Discovered Below The Streets Of Manchester

Hidden Underground City Discovered Below The Streets Of Manchester

A YouTuber struck gold on a late night urban exploration, finding a network of streets below the modern day city

Simon Catling

Simon Catling

Exploring the historical secrets of cities has become big business for YouTubers, but a group of urban explorers hit the jackpot in Manchester, when a journey that started by squeezing through a drain cover hole turned into the discovery of an entire network of ancient streets below the modern day city. Watch below:

The excitable group move through the dead of night as they seek to find what lies below the north west city and as the drain cover comes off they're soon maneuvering themselves down a ladder into the underground.

"Have we actually just walked into like an actual city under Manchester?" one of them asks in disbelief as they hit the bottom.

Inside they find building walls, staircases, an open window with what looks like bullet holes and brick walls with writing marking a passageway stating: 'To arch No. 5'.

The clip ends with the the group seeming spooked after hearing some creepy sounds, so they hastily make their way back to the surface.

Night Scrape/Youtube

However, despite the abrupt escape, they managed to get enough footage to ensure the video has gone on to be viewed more than 1.6 million times.

According to The Sun, the location the intrepid explorers found themselves were in fact the Victorian Arches, which were said to be used for businesses in the 1800s and were later adopted by a number of people as a safe space during the air raids of the Second World War.

That would certainly explain the buildings, the staircases and the toilets seen in the video. Some of the more modern fixtures are a result of recent work by the likes of the Piccadilly-Victoria railway tunnel scheme - an abandoned underground project - and the Guardian Exchange.

Urban exploring is a hugely popular trend now, but for every escapade that goes well, there's inevitably plenty where they don't find what they were hoping for, are found to be trespassing, or in fact find it too dangerous to continue.

Night Scrape / Youtube

There can't have been many that have gone worse than this one in 2016, however, which saw a teenager lose his index finger after an urban exploration went wrong.

Guy Ravenhill, 15, was out with his friends, Isaac Longman, Kyle Barber and Josh McArthur, climbing some water towers near Medstead in Hampshire back in May 2016.

All was going hunky dory until they'd finished and on the walk back, at around 5.50pm, saw a tall radio mast.

However, to get there they needed to get over a wire fence. This didn't seem to be a problem as there was an old fridge tipped over that gave them the platform to get over.

"This is where it all went to s***," Guy told LADbible.

"My muddy shoes made me slip off the fridge and as I fell, my right index finger got caught between the spikes and was subsequently ripped off."

A lengthy hospital stay and an operation ensued.

Featured Image Credit: Night Scape/YouTube

Topics: UK News, Interesting, Manchester, Weird