Subterranea: The Long Way Under

About the book

One man. One bet. Three hundred and eighty-eight miles. When Dave accepts a drunken pub bet to walk from London to Edinburgh using underground routes, he assumes it’ll be tough. What begins as a joke becomes a 388‑mile odyssey through the hidden world beneath Britain: forgotten coal seams, Victorian post tunnels, military corridors, drainage culverts, telecom ducts, nuclear‑facility perimeters, and the strange, secret network of people who seem to know he’s coming. Along the way he rescues livestock, dodges armed police, survives on ration packs of indeterminate colour, and discovers that the A1 has an entire shadow‑infrastructure running beneath it. And someone, somewhere, keeps clearing the way for him. Mud, darkness, toads, bureaucracy, danger, kindness, and the occasional sandwich: this is the story of one man, one bet, and the long, ridiculous road under the road. Subterranea is a funny, heartfelt, and quietly epic journey through the Britain most people never see - and one man will never forget.