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Lucy Lavers et al.," Adventurous Vents: A Journey through the Ventilation Shafts of Britain" (Penguin, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Susanna Prizeman
I was groomed to become one of his wives.
- [00:03]
Judy Ovens
This week on Disorder, the podcast that orders the disorder, an Epstein survivor tells me her story and what justice looks like for her.
- [00:13]
Susanna Prizeman
I want to see action, and I am demanding action.
- [00:16]
Lucy Lavers
Do not just talk the talk.
- [00:18]
Judy Ovens
You need to start walking the walk now. It's one of the most powerful interviews I've ever done in over 20 years as a journalist. Search disorder in your podcast app to listen right now.
- [00:31]
Susanna Prizeman
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:35]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be Speaking with all three authors of the book published by Penguin in 2025, titled Adventurous Vents, A Journey through the Ventilation Shafts of Britain, which is fascinating because we have tons of ventilation shafts. I had a vague idea going into this book that, like, oh, yeah, now that I think of it, there's probably a bunch. I had absolutely no idea how many, how different they all looked, what some of the purposes were. So, yes, we are going to be talking about the Industrial Revolution and sort of Victorian brickwork. We're also going to be talking about vents that look really different to that, that are much more modern and often right in front of us, which we don't even notice. So this is a book that takes us to all sorts of different places that we might pass every day that we may not and really gives a different perspective of kind of the everyday built environment that many of us live in. So I'm very pleased to have, as I said, all three authors of the book, Lucy Lavers, Judy Ovens, and Susanna Prizeman, are all here with me on the podcast. Thank you all for joining me.
- [01:51]
Susanna Prizeman
Thank you very much for inviting us.
- [01:53]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
I would love to start off with some introductions and especially the origin story of the book. So maybe, Judy, you could start us off.
- [02:02]
Judy Ovens
Okay, lovely. So I'm Judy and in 2004 I co founded Rhat with my fellow authors Lucy and Susanna. And Rhat is an education, an architecture education charity. We devise and deliver practical and creative projects for schools and also events for the general public. And they're usually focused on a building or an area. Now, this book grew out of a project called Inventive Vents about ventilation shafts. And we decided that Ventilation Shafts would be a great project to teach children about London's underground infrastructure. And it also provided us with a wonderful building type for their, which would be exciting for their creative, practical projects. And the project included adult events like tube tours and bus tours to see events and we also worked with volunteers to, to map vents across London. And as a legacy to that project, we published a book, we self published a book about vents. Our first vents book, which is called Inventive, A Gazetteer of London's Ventilation Shafts. And that turned out to be rather more successful than we thought. And so we approached the Penguin books with this book, Adventurous Vents, to look at vents nationally and they commissioned it. So that's how the project started and it was obviously natural to do the whole thing together.
- [04:07]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That is a lovely origin story to the book. Susanna, do you want to add anything?
- [04:12]
Susanna Prizeman
Well, not, not to that, but I'm going to talk about the first vent that we describe in the book, please. Yeah, I, I am Susannah. And the first vent is a bit of an outlier. It's actually really quite different to the other, most of the other vents in that it. Most of the other vents are all connected with a utility, so something useful like a sewage system or a road tunnel or even bomb shelters, that kind of thing. But this very first ventilation series, because there's actually more than one, is part of Scott's grotto, which was built in the 1760s. And the ventilation shafts are actually connected to a series of underground spaces that were designed to delight and entertain. The grotto goes 20 meters into a hill and it's dug 10 meters from the top, so lots of digging. The chambers are decorated with flints, shells and minerals in lovely patterns and it's a wonderful example of an 18th century grotto. The network of ventilation shafts were also themselves decorative and made in. Have different shaped sections and they keep the air very, very sweet. And they've also kept the grotto in remarkably good condition. The part at the front is damaged, but deep inside the hill the decoration is just fantastic. It was designed by John Scott as part of his garden. He was a Quaker poet, a man of ideas who knew also a great deal about road building, because I think that's where he got part of his income. Other Guochets from the same period seem to have benefited from such an extensive ventilation system and they aren't in quite such sort of fresh condition as a result. It appears that Scott may have been inspired to build the grotto as a means of keeping local people employed over the winters. And moreover, he wanted his London friends to visit him. He was very worried by all the diseases in London, so, so he wanted people to come and see him. So he had friends such as Samuel Johnson, who described his grotto as a fairy hall. And lots of people did come and visit him, because they were grottos were really popular things at the time. They were sort of a great attraction. But his grotto also demonstrates how the technology of ventilation shafts was beginning to really proceed apace. They had started using ventilation in canal building and also in mining. So it sort of shows how that technology was beginning to really be understood by people.
- [07:51]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that's a very good first vent, then. Thank you for that beginning. How many events do you then go on to cover in the book from that starting point? And how did you decide kind of how many and which ones to focus on?
- [08:06]
Lucy Lavers
Hello, my name is Lucy. I've been working with Susannah Judy since 2004. And it was a difficult choice, I have to say, to decide on the number of events, but we finally chose 100, partly because, for pragmatic reasons that worked with our publishers, because it's a lot of illustrations and information to choreograph. But it also meant that we could focus on the most interesting types of bents, those with varied materials, those with different technologies and different building forms, and we could just focus. We could cover a great sort of chronological time span from the earliest fence we could find right up to the future, in fact. Plus, also, our original book looked at ventilation shafts purely in London, but This selection of 100 meant that we could look in England, Wales and Scotland. So we had a great geographical spread as well.
- [09:09]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I mean, obviously we're not, therefore, just to warn listeners, we're not gonna talk about all hundred. There is no way we possibly could. But that does give a sense of, kind of the breadth of the investigation. And obviously we have the first vent covered in the book already nicely explained. So sort of picking up from that. Susannah, you mentioned that obviously the kind of grottoes and the health sort of aspect was one reason vents were of interest. But you did mention briefly kind of mining and other sort of big industrial revolution things. So can we talk about what some of those sorts of vents were, why they were needed around this period? Can we go more into that, please?
- [09:49]
Judy Ovens
Okay, so some of the reasons that vents are needed. Well, ventilation is needed for any underground space. So ventilation is essentially taking out hot and possibly contaminated air and introducing cool and fresh air. Underground spaces can get incredibly hot and both people and equipment can get overheated if there isn't ventilation. So wherever you see a ventilation shaft on the surface, you know there's something working away underground that needs ventilating. And that can be an underground railway, a sewer, a road tunnel, a mine, a car park, a power hub. And interestingly while now we see more vents in urban areas, they were originally mainly employed in rural areas. And that's because, as Susanna said, they started with mines. And when the Industrial revolution really got underway, the call for coal was immense. And so mines needed to go a lot deeper. And when they went deep, a lot of gases, poisonous and explosive gases, were released. And that meant that effective ventilation was absolutely crucial to keeping people safe. And so that was put into place. But then also the need to transport that coal and other raw materials, like the. The iron ore, that the coal was needed for smelting, that meant that first of all, the canal network was created and then the railways were built. And neither of those forms of transport is much good at going uphill. So wherever higher ground was encountered, a tunnel needed to be bored and the tunnels needed ventilation. I mean, particularly because at that time, both the canal boats and the trains were powered by steam, and that could be quite asphyxiating in a tunnel. And in fact, sadly, there were quite a lot of accidents and people being very ill or even dying. So then in the second half of the 19th century, the integrated sewer systems that started to be built in towns and cities, such as Joseph Bazalgette system in London and James Newland system in Liverpool, they took ventilation very seriously as well, having learned from a lot of past problems with explosions, with the dangerous sewer gases, which. Which were quite explosive. So ventilation was designed in there, mainly in the form of the cast iron stink pipes that you can see all over the place, but also some splendid brick towers and the once common gas destructor lamps, which are rather nicely named. They were a special type of gas lamp which was designed to burn off methane from the sewers and other sewer gases. They actually ran on town gas and they were alight 24 hours a day. They drew up the gases from the sewers and apparently they made the lamps burn more brightly. That made the lamps burn more brightly. And then as we moved into the 20th century, uses changed with the advent of the car road. Tunnels and car parts also required ventilation, and also subterranean power hubs as well. And we'll be talking more about cars and so on in a minute.
- [14:20]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That is a very helpful introduction to kind of some of the big industrial reasons why we needed these for those sorts of. And yes, I would like to talk more about cars, please, because when I started reading the book, I admit that kind of was my immediate second thought. Right. First was the sort of, ooh, there must be. That must explain all the Victorian brickwork.
- [14:41]
Susanna Prizeman
Right.
- [14:41]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
The second thought was like wait a second, if vents are needed to get out, as you mentioned, sort of hot and potentially bad air, how does that work when the thing above to vent into isn't land? Right. If we're looking at for example the Mersey Tunnel in Liverpool or obviously the big one, the Channel Tunnel, how do vents work when the tunnel is underwater?
- [15:04]
Susanna Prizeman
Ah, well, transport tunnels have always had to deal with the dangerous fumes they did with the railways. So I suppose some of that technology had started in the 19th century. But initially when transport, short transport tunnels were going underwater, were being used for passengers, for foot, foot pedestrians and for horses and carts. They didn't have to have very complex ventilation shafts systems in order to work. Basically the, the shafts that were dug to take the material away were sufficient for allowing clean fresh air to enter the tunnels and then also to get out, to be. Yeah, to let the bad air out. So there's a tunnel under the Clyde. There were tunnels that were built under the Thames that had lifts sometimes to take people down or stairs or whatever. So they would be quite deep. But in fact those tunnels would be just vented with the access and exits. But as the motor car became more and more popular then ventilation really had to be considered very thoroughly in the design. There was a near disaster that happened in the early 1930s in, in Pittsburgh where a number of drivers were overcome with carbon monoxide poisoning in a tunnel. Fortunately they survived, but it caused the members of the Queensway Tunnel Committee in Liverpool to reconsider what they were doing. And the result of that was the building of six absolutely magnificent ventilation shafts. They're built on opposite banks of the Merseyside. One major and two more minor ones for each side were built. Each shaft was equipped with two sets of ventilating equipment to make sure that there was no mixing of clean and foul air. The fumes were emitted well above the neighboring buildings and they have enormous fans which extract the foul air and another set of fans that take them in. The scale is very, very impressive indeed. And probably they're actually built rather bigger than was absolutely necessary. But they do harmonize architecturally with the surrounding buildings. On the one side the steel framed vent structures are faced with Portland stone and on the other with brick. Another tragedy, the Mont Blanc tunnel fire in 1999 spearheaded further changes and improvements in safety and at that time, tragedy. A lot of people were killed and the tunnel was shut for years, which was also enormously disruptive. And it led to existing road tunnels such as the Tyne Tunnel and the Dartford Tunnel having their Ventilation systems being thoroughly tested and upgraded. In the case of the Tyne Tunnel. The system in the Dartford Tunnel is unidirectional and it has reversible jet fans that are designed to blow the smoke away from the site of an accident. So if you were stuck in a behind a, say a lorry that had caught fire, the smoke would be blown away from you and you wouldn't have it coming back into you. So it makes it a lot lot so safer. Sensors also monitor the air quality and the visibility as well. And they're all part of a high tech environment. And that is rather beautifully expressed in the language of the modernist architecture of the actual vents. In the case of the Tyne Tunnel vent and the Dartford Tunnel and also the postmodernist temple like structures for the Limehouse Link tunnel which snakes its way underground to London Docklands. The Channel Tunnel which is a pretty multi purpose tunnel for with its high speed rail and also it has a lot of lorries going on it as well as motor cars. And it's the longest sub aqueous tunnel in the world at 50 kilometers. And it was something that people had dreamed about creating and indeed had been attempting to dig something under there for hundreds of years. The earliest proposal was by a man called Albert Matthieu Fabio and it had huge flues sticking up out of the Channel C and a floating island where you could change horses. Presumably the huge flues were to prevent the waves from flooding the tunnel. But actually what has been built to ventilate this tunnel is instead a system of fan stations, chillers and water pipes which keeps the temperature down below 50 degrees. And a system of two parallel tunnels with an extra service tunnel that has all the sort of firefighting equipment in it as well. And that there are a whole supply of cross ducts which allows for variations in pressure. The fans and chillers and air intakes are housed in industrial sheds both sides of the Channel in Songat and in a place called Samphar Ho, which was created from all the stuff that was dug out at the tunnel. And yeah, they're sort of behind very high security fences and kept very safe, but they don't really look like ventilation shafts as the rest in the ones that we see in the rest of the book.
- [22:14]
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- [22:44]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, those are some really key examples of events that make a massive difference, right? I mean can realize, for example, dreams that people have had, as you said, for quite a long time. What are some of the other examples of really impactful events in the book? Either ones that are still really important or ones that were for a time.
- [23:02]
Lucy Lavers
We've managed to select four very impactful events, Some for their appearance, some for their social impact. And the first one that we've, we've got as our, our prime example is the Western pumping station. It built in 1872 to an Italian design and located on the northern embankment of the River Thames in London. And this, this pumping station was part of the Joseph Bazalgette sewer system which has radicalized London and been adopted as a system in in other cities. The vent was originally part built as part of the renowned Joseph Baseljet sue system and ventilated a pumping station which had been constructed so that sewage was raised high enough to then travel by gravity to the eastern outskirts of London. And the tower is still in use, but now no longer ventilates the pumping station, but acts as a mega stink pipe to the London sewer system. The impact and why the Bazalgette system was used was because the River Thames in London at the time was becoming flooded with floating sewage. It smelt disgusting. And one summer it was so bad that parliamentarians finally decided that something had to be done. And on constructing the system it meant that in health terms, the stinking River Thames was cleared of all these disgusting smells. And more importantly, cholera was eradicated from the city. It also meant that barriers and embankments were built alongside the side of the Thames and that created more usable land along the edges of the Thames. And now many of the London iconic land landmarks are located along these. This land. The system was built beautifully, beautifully constructed, many sort of ovoid shaped tunnels out of exquisite brickwork that's today still in use and provides not only systems routes for the sewage to be discharged under the city, but also provides routes for our underground system. And so this had an amazing impact when it was first introduced in 1872, but also is still in use and incredibly successful today. The other impact that vents have had is sometimes on their stunning visual impact. And one we've chosen to illustrate this is the Justice Mill Lane ventilator which was built in 1905 and is way up in Aberdeen. Aberdeen is a city made from granite and particularly gray in color and isn't always the sunniest of places. So this ventilation shaft sits on a traffic island. It's about 3 meters of high. But what's extraordinary is it's of a fantastic and ornate design, decorated with foliage and highly coloured with iridescent blues and golds and very much at odds with its function as a ventilation shaft and its cold grey setting. The vent was made by a foundry called the Saracen Foundry in Glasgow by a group called McFarland and it is thought to have been inspired by the Parisian art nouveau metro designs. And it's very much of that look, but it's incredibly cleverly and forward looking thinking in that what it ventilates is a stacked sewage and electric cableway system. So they've combined the two systems in one, which isn't something we've seen in any other ventilation shafts. And it's still in use today by Scottish and Southern Energy. We have two more choices. The third one is called the Giotto Tower and built in Leeds in 1899. And this tower was designed based on the Campanile next to the Duomo in Florence. So again looking to sort of Europe for inspiration. It was, I quote, seen as a startling innovation in Leeds and many thought as foolish for giving such a utilitarian feature an artistic aspect. This is because it was for a factory set up by a man called Thomas Harding and factories weren't known then for such amazing aspirations. The factory had initially been flat, spinning and then making steel pins. And not only was it artistic, but it was also in response to the Public health Act of 1875 which had recognized industrial air pollution to be a serious health issue. So this chimney helped successfully prolong the workers lives and it allowed by its dust extraction some reuse of the waste materials. It forms an amazing landmark alongside two other towers of a similar height and forms a sort of mini San Giuliano of, of Leeds. All brick, huge brick towers. Our final choice made also stunning visual impact, is one known as the Optic cloak, built in 2016 and it sits again in London or on the edges of London along a very pretty millennium way. In Greenwich it's seen as a sort of landmaker landmark gateway to the Greenwich peninsula. And its use is to conceal a set of low energy flues. But it, it's a stunning piece. It's about 40 meters high and 20 meters wide, but it's clad in thousands of perforated aluminium triangles which are hung from a steel structure below and they're overlaid with one another and quite. And which gives an effect of constant motion. So the whole thing changes as well, week by week, depending on the season, how much sunshine there is, what the weather is and what the overall quality of light is. So as you're driving along this gritty roadway, you suddenly have this mirage as you pass by, which is very uplifting when you're on that route.
- [30:07]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Those are some very cool examples indeed. And it's actually on that sort of theme of the visual impact that I'd like to stay, but kind of going the opposite way. So instead of talking about vents that are kind of amazing to look at, can we talk about some vents that are incredibly disguised? And I certainly would have had no way of knowing they were vents without this book. Can we talk about some of those?
- [30:33]
Judy Ovens
Yeah. So. Well, I mean, amongst. Amongst the vents in our book, there are some that make a big point of their purpose, such as the huge brutalist vent at Vauxhall for the tube station. But the majority in the book actually are pretty well disguised, which adds to the joy of finding them and thinking about what they. What they're actually used for. So, in fact, the vent that kicked off the whole project was one by the artist Eduardo Paolozzi in Pimlico that looks just like an interesting sculpture, which it actually is, but it also serves as a vent. It's only when you start thinking more deeply about why there's sort of mesh and grills that you realize that it is a vent. And when we saw it, we thought, ah, so there must be lots of other vents around that would be similarly interesting and disguised. And so that's how the project came about. There are plenty of others posing as sculptures in the book. There's the designer Thomas Heatherwick's Angel's Wings in Paternoster Square in London, close to St Paul's Cathedral. And there's the artist David Hamilton's Parsons Polygon in Newcastle, which was designed for the Newcastle Metro. But also, you know, right from the beginning, in fact, vents tended to be disguised. When the first railways were built, they were on land, they often went across land owned by the rich and powerful, and they weren't keen on seeing any old thing popping up on their land. They wanted something special that was like a folly, which would be pleasing to the eye. And at the time, the liking for medieval architecture, the Victorians loved the medieval architecture aesthetic, meant that the railway companies sort of adopted a medieval architecture style for their. For a lot of their buildings. And so there are many vents which are shaped like castle turrets, really. There is particularly spectacular pair on the Kilsby Tunnel on the London to Birmingham line. And those ones benefited not just from the need to please the landowner, but also to reassure the public. The engineer, Robert Stevenson really felt that it was important to encourage the public to think they'd be safe. It was quite early in the history of Railway Travel, 1838, and the Press had been frightening the public, telling them that they were likely to suffocate in railway tunnels. So Stevenson made them absolutely huge to encourage people to think that they would be perfectly safe going through the tunnel. So when the underground railway started to be built in London in the 1860s, it was using the cut and cover method, whereby tunnels were dug from above and then covered over and gaps needed to be left for the trains, which was still steam trains, to literally vent off. So they would, they would go into gaps in the tunnels which were open to the air and release all their smoke. And in Leinster Gardens near Paddington in London, we've got a very good example of a disguise vent. There's a terrace. So in Leinster Gardens it's a terrace of neoclassical houses. It looks complete, but on close inspection of numbers 23 and 24, you can see there's something a bit wrong. It's not quite the same. The windows are blank and the doors are solid. They don't have any letter boxes. And then when you go around to the back, you see that the front is just a facade. It's all there is of the house under which the railway lines pass. And then there's a big hole at the back and that was where the trains could vent off. The whole house, or both houses were taken down for the cut and cover and then they weren't actually going to be replaced. But the residents were so annoyed by the idea of having a hole in their terrace that the compromise with the railway company was that they would build this facade and, and so it would look the same as the rest of the houses. There's a similar situation in old Eldon Square in Newcastle, but this was a lot later, 100 years later, when the metro was being built in the 1970s in, in Newcastle, there was one of the houses there was compulsorily purchased and hollowed out for a vent to, to be housed. That in that case the whole house is still there, but it, but it's now just a vent and you can tell that again by the blacked out windows and louvers in the roof. So those are little things to give us a clue and Then there are also statues. So there's a statue of the railway engineer James Greathead, who was very important in designing Tunneling Shield. There's a statue of him that was erected in the 1990s in Cornhill above Bank tube station in the center of London. And that is. It looks like a statue on lovely Portland stone. In fact, it looks quite solid. The Portland stone is hollow, allowing for a vent to come up through it. An extraordinary example of a vent that you wouldn't have guessed was there is the one housed in the Wellington Arch at Hyde Park. And the arch was originally built in the 1820s to celebrate Wellington's victory at Waterloo. And it's gone through quite a few changes since then over the years. But the one probably least known is the one when part of the south side of the arch has been adapted to allow for a vent for the new underpass that was built in the 1960s under Hyde Park Corner to link Knightsbridge and Piccadilly. And that vent is still there and venting off the traffic fumes.
- [38:59]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Those are some absolutely great examples of very disguised vents. And now that we've kind of covered at least some of the very hidden ones, some of the more spectacular ones, what sorts of tips might you all have for. For people who want to go around and try and spot vents? What might they want to look for?
- [39:18]
Susanna Prizeman
Well, I suppose the first thing about spotting vents is that once you start thinking about them and once you become aware that they something that you can spot, then you do start seeing them. And one of the really nice things about having written this book is the number of people who've written to us today to say, oh, have you seen this vent? Or sent us photographs or whatever. Do you know this one? And actually, quite often we don't know that one because there are vents all over the place. Obviously there are lots and lots of stink pipes in cities. But there are also the lovely ventilating bollards that we found in Bristol that used for the electrical substations to cool the electrical equipment. And I would love to know whether they exist in other cities, because they might well do. I mean, there are boring bollards that are just sort of very standardized, but these ones date from the late 1920s, early 1930s, and they're very varied and quite extraordinary. But yeah, and some of them also hum as well. But yeah, there are clues, definite clues that you can look out for, like grills and flanges and that kind of thing. And in fact, on our. We had a trip to Liverpool to go and look at some fame. All the famous vents there. And whilst we were there, we discovered a vent which was very exciting. We were on our way to look at the subsidiary vents for the rocket launcher style Kingsway Tunnel vent. And we went through Exchange Flags Square. And in the middle of that there's this enormous high Victorian monumental sculpture called the Nelson Monument that was made, or that was a big public sculpture that was paid for by public subscription. And the base of this sculpture, which has a nude representation of Nelson's apotheosis on top of it. And it's a very complex sculpture with all sorts of iconography, but under that it has a base and that includes a series of decorative grills covered in stars and elaborate patterns. But on looking closely, you could see that air was being allowed to circulate through the grills. So on further research, we found out that not only had it actually been designed as a ventilation shaft for a warehouse in this very important part of the city where there are lots of buildings and lots of, you know, land was at a premium. And so it had been designed for a warehouse originally and now that space is used as an underground car park. But during the Second World War, it had actually been used to ventilate the military HQ for the Western Approaches Command. So they built a bomb proof shelter for. For the hq. So that was a really exciting discovery that we made. And there are definitely lots more out there to be spotted. I had a big disappointment though, when. When I went to the Welsh assembly to have a look at their ventilation shafts, which are interesting, but we didn't actually include them in the book, but I found all these other large structures. There's a sort of big public space on the. And I thought that perhaps they were connected to an underground tunnel, but it turned out that they weren't. So there are disappointments along the way as well.
- [44:01]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Definitely interesting to kind of have a go and see what one can spot. And it sounds like people can visit these, right? I mean, to kind of look around and sort of see what might happen. Can you go inside any of these vents?
- [44:15]
Judy Ovens
Okay, so. Well, all of them. All of the vents in our book can actually be looked at from the outside. Some are on private land and need to be viewed from footpaths or roads or over garden walls. We do give accessibility details in the book, but actually there are some that you can go inside. I mean, first of all, the wonderful, elegant Art Deco building, George Dock in the Liverpool, in Liverpool for the Mersey Tunnel that Susanna was talking about, you can go on a fantastic tour there, which we did, where you can see the huge fan in action and also you can go out onto the car deck. There are a lot of steps involved, but it really is a great tour. So if anyone's in Liverpool, we'd certainly recommend that. Rather different experience is walking through the disused Kelmarsh railway tunnel, which is now part of Brampton Valley Way, a foot and cycling path that's in Northamptonshire. Tunnels, very dark, quite echoey, a little bit spooky, and no lights at all, so good to take a torch. But as you get further in, you start to see a circle of light on the ground and so obviously you're drawn towards it. And then once you get there, you look up and you're looking straight up through a vent, through a big railway vent, and can see the sky above and also the wonderful brickwork of the vent. So that's quite an exciting one to go to. And then also there are a couple of nuclear bunkers that we feature in the book. So they were built in the 1950s and 60s, when everybody was very concerned about the issue of nuclear war. And there's a huge one at Kelvedon Hatch. There's the ventilation shaft, that's itself is rather shrouded in vegetation, but you can visit the nuclear bunker there. And then there's also an example in Scotland, in fact, of 1 of the 1500 underground nuclear observation posts that were scattered across the nation in the 50s and 60s. They were. The point of them was that people, especially designated people, who were going to monitor the nuclear fallout, would go into these shelters, which were concrete, and monitor the fallout as it happened. So there are ventilation shafts above ground and that is all you see above ground. Now you can visit the one at Skelmally in Scotland and you just. You can go in three at a time. You have to climb down the ladder and you can see how they were kitted out for the three observers who would be down there with their radioactive fallout monitoring equipment. They had a chemical toilet, cold tinned food, cleaning products, all very spartan. And then the ventilation shafts presumably would have let in some of the radiation. I don't know how that would have worked. Luckily it didn't. It was never put to the test, so we didn't need to worry about it.
- [48:41]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Goodness, that is very intense indeed. I'm glad that that never ended up getting used. And that's such an interesting dive sort of into the past. I believe it was Lucy perhaps, who mentioned earlier in our conversation that the book also talks a bit about the future of Vents. So maybe we can sort of discuss that as we come to towards the end of our conversation.
- [49:02]
Lucy Lavers
Yes, we've already seen that vents will continue to develop in a myriad of ways. And we've selected some recently built vents to illustrate the potential future developments. They include vents used as part of a low energy building strategy, or vents using incredibly futuristic materials and also a scheme to reuse waste heat. Basically all celebrating the move towards a cleaner and more energy efficient systems. The first example is a library built in Coventry in 2000. It's called the Manchester Library and it was designed by Professor Alan Short and associates using a wind tower strategy which, which is thought to have originally originated in Iran. And so the library has its perimeter walls which are about five stories high, partly formed by 20 angled full height brick ventilation stacks. Dictating the form of the building and how it works is cool air is drawn into the building at basement level into a plenum, so providing fresh cool air at the base of these stacks and as part of a passive ventilation strategy. And then this air works its way up through the building by the stacks and by a series of atria until finally the hot air gets exhausted from the top of these not chimneys, but they're through these ventilation stacks which have been topped with a sort of glittering array of baffles, allowing hot air to exhaust even when there are high winds. You wouldn't want the filthy air blown, hot air blown back down into the building. And Professor Short and associates are continually developing these systems. So this building was built in 2000, but he subsequently built and refined this system to use in more of their projects, always providing a sustainable, low energy, natural ventilated building and avoiding more emissions which contribute to urban heat gain. And a slightly different tack, but fantastically futuristic is event that we got illustrated in Manchester. It's called the Tower of Light and it is designed by a group of architects called Tonkin Liu who have using a new sort of digital age aesthetic developed with the engineering group arup. They've used this fence shaft which conceals so they they using a new digital age aesthetic developed with Arab engineers. This vent shaft uses biomimicry technology based on mollusk shell geometry and combined with a craft of tailoring and they designed an animated and sparkling tower of light. This same technology that they've developed Tonkin Liu over many years has also been used to develop an innovative, innovative stent. As the futuristic geometry they've used allows the flexible adaptation to a patient's anatomy. So an amazing contrast of uses. The tower itself is constructed using Thin sheets of steel, laser cut, shaped and welded together. And it houses internal mirrors which move in the wind to reflect the light and disrupt the surface at night, lit with LEDs. And it houses flues for a low carbon energy center, which provide heat and hot water for all the major new buildings in the Civic Quarter of Manchester. So a fantastic development on a more recycling, I think. Cullinan Studios in 2020 built what's called the Bunhill 2 Energy Centre. And this was a radical proposal to turn waste heat from the Tube into usable power. It was a scheme devised by Ramboll engineers in collaboration with Transport for London, the Mayor of London and Islington Council to upgrade an existing disused vent so that heat generated by train engines and brakes could be captured and reused rather than released to pollute the atmosphere. And the heat that is gained from this is used to provide energy for more than 1,000 homes locally. Generally in the summer, the system can be reversed to cool the homes rather than heat them. The vents in this system have been housed within a red anodized aluminium enclosure perforated with patterns that are based on Islamic geometry and Gothic tracery. But if you look closely, what's rather nice is you can sort of see the machinery behind the screen surround. So it makes an incredibly dramatic statement in the local area. And we imagine that the next iteration of events will need to harness ideas from all of these in a bid to provide energy saving, sustainable and non polluting structures of the future.
- [54:57]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Very intriguing indeed. To see what might be coming going forward, can I ask, on the theme of things going forward, what are each of you or as a group working on now that this book is out in the world? Anything you want to give us a sneak preview of now to conclude our discussion?
- [55:15]
Judy Ovens
Well, I think one thing is we've been well and truly bitten by the vent bug and we'd like to go on to do a book about vents internationally, but we haven't actually put that to anyone yet. We're just talking about it amongst ourselves. We'll have to chat to our publishers about it. But we're also putting together a proposal at the moment for a project on a post war South London social housing estate which was built by London County Council. And the project would celebrate the artwork which was designed to be integral to the estate, which includes a Henry More sculpture which is very little seen because I don't think most people know it's there. So we're hoping to do a project there.
- [56:15]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that certainly sounds intriguing and of course, while you are off deciding and working on next projects, listeners can read the book we've been discussing. And who knows, maybe go investigate themselves. The book is titled Adventurous Vents, A Journey through the Ventilation Shafts of Britain, published by Penguin in 2025. Lucy, Judy, Susanna, thank you all so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [56:38]
Judy Ovens
Thank you.
- [56:39]
Susanna Prizeman
Thank you.
- [56:53]
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