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Buchanan Galleries has transformed the top of Buchanan Street since it opened in March 1999.

As one of the city's premier retail sites, it's also known as one of the best shopping precincts in the whole of the UK.

But many residents might still be unaware that its development threw up a hidden part of the area that few have ever seen, or heard about: a secret network of deep-level, hidden tunnels that populate the city centre.

The key to this discovery?

The curious, stand alone building that sits at the junction of Cathedral Street and North Hanover Street.

A small building that used to be decorated in iron cladding, when the Galleries were built it was redecorated to blend in with the adjacent car park.

And what looks like a building that services the car park ventilation or electrics is in fact something totally different.

It's a lift shaft, which houses a vehicle lift down to a tunnel, no fewer than ten storeys deep.

The tunnel runs all the way from the traffic island across from the Royal Infirmary to the old telephone exchange at the western end of Bothwell Street, underneath the subway lines and Queen Street low level train lines.

Incredibly, this was part of wider network of link tunnels that joined each other and operated on various different levels and cover most of the city centre, with the telephone exchange tunnel at its heart.

The old telephone exchange, or Dial House as it’s known, was built in the early 50s for the former GPO building to house the general processor for the whole of the west of Scotland.

Totally fortified and designed to withstand a nuclear bomb, it housed part of a network of Cold War telephone exchanges built across the UK in Manchester, Birmingham and London.

Meaning that if Glasgow was destroyed, the telephone network would be maintained.

Some who worked in the Dial House building were told that the tunnels also served as an escape route for staff to a bomb shelter hidden under George Square, one which was given further weight given the service tunnel that led to the Royal Infirmary (which could supply medical equipment).

This confirms the assertion by former employees of the city council of the possible existence of a network of smaller tunnels accessed from the City Chambers, one of which runs from the Chambers to North Court Lane off Royal Exchange Square (a discreet exit point).

While rumours also exist about the presence of a laboratory housed in the basement of the Dial House site (three levels down) which operated a jet wing component test facility in the years following WW2.

Some observers have gone as far as claim that a nuclear bunker exists under George Square and is serviced by the tunnels, when the reality is that, given the depth of the tunnels and the propensity of them to succumb to flooding from the nearby Clyde in the event of a catastrophe, such a location would be highly unsuitable.

The most concrete theory rests in the possibility of the existence of an 'emergency room' of sorts, built to offer only immediate, limited protection.

An idea which seems plausible given both the time-frame and Glasgow's status as a major industrial and commercial centre, where the tunnels served all sorts of conventional uses - one hidden from public knowledge due to health and safety concerns and commercial confidentiality.

It is known that a fully equipped Royal Observer Cops Monitoring post existed within the city, built in August 1960 and closed in 1991.

Located on Shieldhall Road and accessible by a hatch, it provided meteorological weather reports which would have been used to plot and predict the path of radioactive fallout following a nuclear attack, and was a very rare example of such a monitoring site to be found within a city, as they were almost exclusively located in rural locations.

What is certain is that the tunnels were part of a wider network, some of which served to connect other GPO buildings in Glasgow city centre (with communication between them being a number 1 priority) , such as the old GPO Head Office on George Square and the exchange next to the Savoy Centre on Renfrew Street.

Surprisingly, the tunnel stretching to the old GPO building on George Square, which now houses luxury flats and restaurants such as Jamie Oliver’s Italian, housed an automated narrow gauge railway line with a small train that delivered the mail and other goods to and from, one which passed straight underneath Central Station.

This meant that mail taken off trains at Central Station was sent to each building without the necessity to take it to street level.

The major banks in the city are also said to have been linked to the network, as conduits between the banks and various exchanges in the city, allowing for easy access to customer premises below street level.

The clue to their existence also lies not just with the lift shaft at the Buchanan Galleries car park, but also via a network of cooling vents (painted dark green/grey), air shafts and emergency escape hatches, visible at street level throughout the city in places such as Washington St, Cathedral St, Hope St and Blythswood St.

Concerning the cooling vents, as the tunnels house such an extensive network of communication equipment, valves and copper cabling, constant cooling is required to maintain their operational function.

Air is also blown through the tunnels to stop the risk of natural gas build up causing an explosion.

Vents to spot in and around Glasgow, symbols as they are of a subterranean network of tunnels hidden from view and public knowledge for years; tunnels which, buried below the subway and low level train lines, deepen our understanding of our city in the Cold War era.