There was the option of asking the Selfridges comms team. The leads of others could have been more obsessively pursued. But maybe some mysteries are more fun left unsolved.
I began dwelling on questions about what does or does not lie beneath the most famous of Oxford Street’s department stores when hanging around Grosvenor Square, thinking about its past and dwelling on the nickname “Little America” that was attached to it and its Mayfair environs during World War 2.
It has been claimed that during the conflict a tunnel was built between the store, founded and owned by Wisconsin-born Harry Gordon Selfridge, and the United States embassy, which at the time was at 1 Grosvenor Square, having moved there in 1938. Previous ambassadors had live at number nine, it says here. The brutalist monolith embassy designed by Eero Saarinen that still occupies the whole of the western end of the square, and is these days a hotel, did not invade the space until 1960.
The story has it that the tunnel was built so that people could move safely between the embassy and a Selfridges basement where members of the US Army Signal Core operated from the early 1940s.
That last part seem uncontested. It is well-documented that subterranean Selfridges space was put to wartime use, including housing a trail-blazing digital scrambling machine called SIGSALY. This enabled messages to be sent across the Atlantic securely.
Wikipedia informs us that Winston Churchill would pop by when needing to drop President Roosevelt a line, and that extensions were later installed at 10 Downing Street and in the Cabinet War Rooms, sparing him the trek from Whitehall. In his book Underground London, Stephen Smith describes Churchill’s “partially enciphered” telephone conversations being “transmitted by cable from the bunker to the department store, where it was fully scrambled and beamed by radio to Washington”.
There is, though, no mention by Smith in a book containing many mentions of tunnels of one between Selfridges and Grosvenor Square. This reinforces my killjoy assumption that there has never been one, but won’t diminish the desire of some, however few and singular, to believe or pretend otherwise.
It’s not the only tale of theoretical avenues beneath the retail emporium’s floor: the Antonine Itineraries has explored the notion that there’s an entire Victorian street down there; Ian Mansfield has exhumed the saga of a pedestrian tunnel linking Bond Street station to Selfridges that never was.
The appetite for such stories, folkloric or factual, suggests the one about a wartime walkway burrowed along on a line somewhere between and parallel with North Audley Street and Duke Street seems likely to endure. After all, it’s inspired me to spend a few minutes unearthing.
That followed my reading – though not mentioning here – that while protesting against the Vietnam War outside the Saarinen US embassy in 1968, someone from The Angry Brigade aired the idea of blowing it up. The question now is where to head for as, metaphorically, I make my exit from the bowels of Selfridges. I’m sure an answer will occur before too long.
John Vane’s London novel, a political satire called Frightgeist, can be bought here. Photo from Selfridges website.
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