Like the Winchester Mystery House crossed with a particularly obsessive Minecraft survival save — except the medium is chalk and concrete, the tools are buckets and wheelbarrows, and the builder is a civil engineer who clearly couldn't stop optimizing. Tony Deane's tunnel network under a suburban Tilehurst home is less a property listing and more a monument to what happens when professional expertise meets decades of uninterrupted creative obsession. The numbers alone are arresting. Four underground levels reaching 15 metres below ground. More than 1,300 square feet of subterranean space. A hand-built railway for moving excavated chalk. A one-tonne goods lift. Two secret doors, one formed by a 1.5-tonne sliding concrete wall. Another entrance hidden inside a 23-foot rocket beside the swimming pool. All of it dug manually — by one man and his six children — over the course of twenty-plus years, starting in the 1960s with pool changing rooms and expanding through the 1980s and 90s into the full network. Deane's day job was building aerodrome and airport infrastructure, which explains both the ambition and the structural competence. Most of the tunnels cut through chalk, which is naturally self-supporting, but where reinforcement was needed, structural concrete was cast by hand. The auctioneer at BTG Eddisons calls it unique, and for once the word is literally accurate — this is not a category of property that exists in multiples. Nobody else did this. What makes the listing genuinely interesting rather than merely eccentric is the planning consent already in place. West Berkshire Council approved a 5,000 sq ft, five-bedroom house on the pool site in December 2024, plus conversion of the existing three-floor, 2,500 sq ft workshop into a three-bedroom house. So you're buying development potential above ground and an irreproducible underground complex below it. The guide price of £300,000–£325,000 is for the site, the workshop, the gardens, the pool, and — oh yes — a hand-dug four-level subterranean labyrinth with a railway. The auctioneer's suggested uses — secure storage, fallout shelter, EMP-resistant data centre, prepper paradise — are predictably imaginative, but the real pitch is simpler: someone spent a working lifetime building something extraordinary under a quiet residential street, and nobody knew. The neighbours didn't know. The tunnels existed as a family secret for decades. That combination of scale, secrecy, and manual craft is the kind of thing that doesn't reproduce. The listing is a time capsule of one person's compulsion, now available to whoever shows up at the live-stream auction on 28–29 October. The honest question for any buyer is structural risk. The listing emphasises chalk's self-supporting properties and Deane's professional engineering background, but twenty years of hand-dug tunnels under a residential property will require serious independent survey work before anyone commits. The guide price reflects the uncertainty — this is cheap for Reading, even without the tunnels. The reward is proportional to the homework.
