The Church Below

[Images: Photos by Lawrence Looi/newsteam.co.uk].

A bored family in Shropshire, England, after having a few too many drinks one night, started playing around with an air grate in their living room floor—which they managed to lift up and out of its grid, crawl through and under the house, and there discover an entire church sitting in the darkness where a basement should be. It was a "dark chapel complete with a large wooden cross on the floor."

Even better, after continuing to search, they found "a staircase in the chapel [that] came out of a cupboard in the dining room." Hidden topologies surround us.

After posting this link on Twitter, meanwhile, Patrick Smith chimed in, asking: "I wonder if stuff in their house moves around?" A poltergeist, turning strange devices on an altarpiece below ground, with a whole family on remote control above.

(Via Tim Maly. Related: The Horrible Secret of Number 6 Whitten Street, Sounding Rooms, Architectural Dissimulation, and many more).

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Blogger twoeightnine said...

I read somewhere that it wasn't actually a church. The previous owner said that it was just some leftover wood. Plus there were numerous bottles of booze.

April 28, 2010 10:27 PM  
Blogger Adam said...

It certainly doesn't look like a church. It may well be though as many houses across the UK have Priest holes where Priests hid from persecutors in the 16th and 17th centuries. As it says in the Wiki entry, "These often took the form of apartments or chapels in secluded parts of the houses, or in the roof space, where Mass could be celebrated with the utmost privacy and safety".

April 29, 2010 4:03 AM  
Blogger Kirk Mantay said...

Hidden topologies? Seriously? That's high on the list of "phrases not to be used outside of a graduate level planning, geography, or architecture course."

May 03, 2010 3:21 PM  

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