NOTTINGHAM Hid 1,000 Caves Under The City That OFFICIALLY Should Not Exist Beneath Streets

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[00:00:00]You think you know Nottingham. Robin Hood, Sherwood Forest, maybe a medieval castle on a hill. A quiet English city with a market square and too many pubs.

[00:00:09]That's what most people think. So, how does it feel to learn that directly beneath those pubs, beneath the shopping centers, beneath the pavements, beneath the houses where people sleep tonight?

[00:00:23]There are over 1,000 hand-carved caves stretching in every direction and archaeologists are still finding new ones. One of those caves was used [music] to topple a queen's lover and change the course of English history.

[00:00:37]Another was a labyrinth so enormous that in 1837 a man wandered into it and got [music] lost for nearly 5 hours. And in the final story today, you'll hear about families who didn't visit these caves.

[00:00:50]They lived in them for generations until >> until the law stepped in to stop it in 1845.

[00:00:57]Today, seven stories, seven layers [music] down. The most disturbing is at the end. Here is the thing about Nottingham. It is not just a city built on history. It is a city built on top of a city which was built on top of another city, which was carved, literally, by [music] hand into the living rock beneath the ground. The sandstone under Nottingham is a particular kind of stone, [music] Triassic Sherwood Sandstone, laid down by desert flash floods around 200 million years ago.

[00:01:28]Compressed slowly into something soft enough to cut with a basic hand chisel, >> [music] >> but stable enough to stand unsupported as an arch or a tunnel for centuries.

[00:01:38]That combination, [music] soft and stable at once, is rare and the people who settled here a thousand years ago [music] noticed it immediately. They started digging.

[00:01:48]They never really stopped. What you get today is a city that has two versions of itself.

[00:01:54]The one above [music] the pavement and the one below it. The one below is older, stranger, and in many ways more honest about what human beings actually [music] do to survive. Seven stories, seven caves, one city that officially has no business [music] being what it is. We start now.

[00:02:14]One, the name that was always there.

[00:02:16]Picture Nottingham in the year 893.

[00:02:19]There is no castle yet, no market square, no legend of Robin Hood.

[00:02:24]That comes later. What there is is a ridge of pale rock rising above a river valley, [music] and on that ridge, a settlement the locals call Tig Guocobauc. Say it slowly. It is Old Brythonic, the ancient Celtic language spoken across Britain before the Saxons arrived.

[00:02:42]And it means, simply, house of caves.

[00:02:46]Not place near caves, not city with some caves.

[00:02:52]House of caves. The caves were the defining fact of this settlement. They were what made it worth naming. The first written record of this name appears in 893 in a text called The Life of King Alfred, written by the Welsh monk and bishop Asser, who visited Nottingham personally and considered its underground architecture remarkable enough to note. That is over 1,100 years ago, and yet, when planners were redeveloping the Broadmarsh Shopping Centre in central Nottingham in recent decades, they kept striking unexpected voids beneath the foundations, caves no one had recorded, caves that had been sitting there quietly for eight or nine centuries while the city built itself above them, layer by layer, >> [music] >> and mostly forgot they existed. The official explanation is straightforward.

[00:03:41]Soft [music] stone, easy tools, practical people. When you need storage, you dig. When you need shelter, you dig.

[00:03:49]When you need a home and you cannot afford to build one above ground, you dig. That explains the existence of the caves. [music] It does not quite explain why the city that invented the word "house of caves" spent the last [music] 200 years acting surprised every time it found another one. By 2008, the recorded count was around 425.

[00:04:12]Today, [music] it stands at 1,000, and archaeologists say they are not done.

[00:04:17]The city built on forgetting that is Nottingham.

[00:04:21]And the forgetting goes deeper than anyone [music] expected, too.

[00:04:25]The man who dug a labyrinth with his hands. Now, let us travel to the northern edge of the city. The year [music] is somewhere around 1785.

[00:04:33]A man named James Rous is working in [music] the rock beneath Dog Kennel Hill off Mansfield Road. He is not an engineer. [music] He is not an archaeologist. He is a sandman, a person who sells [music] sand. In the 18th century, before carpets, before linoleum, households across [music] England spread sand on their stone floors. It kept them clean.

[00:04:55]It absorbed spills.

[00:04:57]It was considered essential, [music] and Rous had a technique for extracting it that would, today, result in immediate criminal prosecution. He [music] chipped at the base of the rock face with a small pick, cutting a narrow horizontal slit about a meter and half high >> [music] >> and 5 ft deep at ground level. Then, lying almost flat, he worked further and further back into the rock. The overhanging ceiling above [music] him growing heavier and lower as he went. Occasionally, it fell on him.

[00:05:26]The records are quite clear on this.

[00:05:28]Being buried by collapsing [music] sandstone was described as the rule, rather than the exception among Rous's workers. He kept going anyway for roughly 30 years, extracting the sand bag [music] by bag on the backs of donkeys, selling it to housewives across Nottingham. By the time he was forced to stop [music] around 1810, when the local council finally closed him down for endangering his workforce, he had carved out something enormous, a labyrinth of passages and chambers stretching 200 m [music] from end to end, branching in every direction, with rooms connecting to the basements of houses above, ways their owners may not have realized. Rouse died in the workhouse. The caves he made were largely forgotten. Then, in 1837, a man described only as more adventurous than others pushed into the entrance, and after nearly 5 hours wandering in the dark, was, according to the original account, glad to find his way back to the outside.

[00:06:32]Stop and sit with that for a moment. 5 hours [music] in the dark, in a space one man had carved by hand. In 1892, entrepreneurs rediscovered the caves and opened them as a tourist attraction.

[00:06:46]>> [music] >> They called it Robin Hood's Mammoth Cave. At Goose Fair time, they lit it [music] up and marketed it as a scene in Fairyland.

[00:06:56]During the Second War, >> [music] >> they converted it into air-raid shelters, cut new entrances, fitted electric lighting, added blast walls. [music] Today, it sits beneath Peel Street, mostly closed to the public, 200 m [music] of sandstone corridor that one elderly sandman left as his only monument. [music] James Rouse never built a house. He never had his name on a public building.

[00:07:19]He had the rock, and the rock kept it.

[00:07:21]Three. The underground city that smelled like [music] death. Move now to the heart of medieval Nottingham, not the medieval city of touristic imagination, the [music] gleaming castles and noble jousting, the other one, the real one. It is the 13th century.

[00:07:37]>> [music] >> You are standing in a cliff face, somewhere beneath what will later be called Drury Hill, the air is thick, not with smoke or mist, with something else.

[00:07:48]Something animal, biological, acidic.

[00:07:52]You're standing in a tannery, not a building, a cave, and around you are vats cut directly [music] into the sandstone floor, filled with a mixture of water, oak bark, and animal [music] urine.

[00:08:03]Inside the vats, hides are soaking, sheep skins mainly. You can tell by the size of the vats, which are too small [music] for cattle. Somewhere nearby, there is an opening to the River Leen, because the hides need to be washed, [music] and the river is Nottingham's water supply. The same water the city drinks.

[00:08:21]Nottingham contains the only known underground tannery [music] in Britain, not the only medieval tannery, the only underground one. The Pillar Cave, part of this system, was originally cut around 1250. It was partially filled by a rockfall around 1400, abandoned for a century, and then cleared and reopened in 1500, at which point new circular pits were added for barrels. It operated for hundreds of years in a space that receives no natural light, no fresh air, and no plumbing beyond proximity to a river. The official explanation for building a tannery underground is practical, constant temperature, privacy, access to the cliff face for ventilation, all reasonable.

[00:09:04]Less reasonable is the fact that no one knows how many similar underground industrial operations exist beneath Nottingham that have never been documented. Every time a new construction project breaks ground in the years city center, there is a genuine chance something unexpected [music] lies below. An archaeologist surveying the area beneath the old Broadmarsh development in recent years found a chamber measuring over 17 m long and 4 m wide, accessible only through a vertical shaft. It was not on any map.

[00:09:37]No one knew it was there. How many more chambers like that are sitting quietly beneath the pavement? The answer, honestly, is unknown. The count is 1,000 and rising, [music] and that is only what has been recorded so far. Four, the families who lived in the rock. Here is a detail that tends to stop people cold when they hear it.

[00:09:58]Until the year 1845, [music] it was legal in Nottingham to rent a cave as a home. Not a quaint stone cottage, not a rustic cellar, a cave.

[00:10:09]A hand-cut hole in sandstone with no window, no fireplace [music] that did not flood with smoke, no running water, often shared by multiple [music] families in a space that a modern estate agents might describe as a studio flat if they were being generous. The area beneath what is now the Broadmarsh Shopping Centre, the neighborhood once called Narrow Marsh and Drury Hill, was, by the early 19th century, described as one of the worst slums in Britain. People did not move there because they liked underground living.

[00:10:42]They moved there because the surface city was full, because landlords could charge money for any space, regardless of what it was, and because the alternative was the street. Children grew up without seeing direct sunlight [music] from their homes. Families cooked, slept, argued, and were born and died in spaces that had been carved out of rock sometime in the previous [music] three centuries for entirely different purposes. The law banning the renting of cellars and caves as homes, [music] passed in 1845 under the street Mary's Nottingham Enclosure Act, did not erase this history. It just stopped [music] it continuing. The walls of those caves still exist. You can go and look at them now [music] as part of the City of Caves attraction. The stone retains chisel marks. In some places, there There soot stains [music] on the ceilings from fires. In one section, researchers found a child's shoe, small, left behind or lost [music] or worn through and discarded by someone who lived there, someone who had no other place to be. The city of Robin Hood, the city where families lived in rock until the Victorian parliaments told them to stop. Five.

[00:11:54]The beer that has been kept underground for 800 years, a different kind of underground now, a warmer one, relatively. Walk into almost any old pub in central Nottingham, and there are a great many old pubs in central [music] Nottingham, and there is a reasonable chance that somewhere beneath your feet, below the floorboards [music] and the concrete, there is a cave. Beer has been stored in Nottingham sandstone caves continuously since at least the 13th century. The temperature [music] underground stays constant regardless of season, somewhere around 10 to 12° [music] C, ideal for conditioning ale. Before refrigeration existed, brewers dug cellars that became caves that became tunnels that connected to other tunnels, creating a sub-basement layer beneath the pub district [music] that is, in places, remarkably elaborate. The Brewhouse Yard complex, nestled at the base of Nottingham Castle's rock [music] face, was once the working heart of a community that used the caves below for storing and transporting [music] beer barrels to and from the castle above.

[00:12:58]Five 17th century cottages still stand [music] there. They are the last survivors of what was a much larger settlement. Beneath them, the caves that served them still exist, carved out of the same pale sandstone. Some date to earlier than the cottages themselves.

[00:13:13]The Malt Cross, a Victorian music hall in the city center built over a site where a Carmelite monastery once stood, has caves below it that were first recorded in the 11th century. They began as monastic storage. They became a Victorian cellar. They are now part of a bar. The longest continuous use of any single location is harder to pin down, but the principle is consistent. The rock holds [music] memory in a way that buildings above ground simply do not.

[00:13:42]Buildings burn.

[00:13:44]Buildings are demolished. Buildings are replaced.

[00:13:47]The rock, when it has been carved correctly and [music] not disturbed, just stays. The yeast that flavors the beer changes. The people who drink it change. The rock does not. Six.

[00:14:00]The tunnel that changed English history.

[00:14:02]The night of October 19th, 1330.

[00:14:05]Nottingham Castle.

[00:14:07]Inside, [music] in his private chambers, a man sleeps. His name is Roger Mortimer, first Earl of March. He is 53 years old, born on the 25th of April, 1287. [music] The same birthday, incidentally, as the king he replaced. He is not [music] king himself. He holds no official title that would explain his real position. What he holds is the queen, [music] Isabella of France, she-wolf of France, widow of Edward II, mother of the current king.

[00:14:39]They have been lovers [music] since at least 1325. Together, they removed Edward II from power, arranged his imprisonment, and almost certainly arranged his murder in Berkeley Castle in 1327. Since then, Mortimer has governed England in all but name. With Isabella at his side and their young king, Edward III, effectively powerless.

[00:15:01]Edward III [music] is 17 years old tonight, and he has had enough. Beneath the castle, at the base of the sandstone cliff, a passage begins. It runs upward through the rock, 98 m of narrow, hand-cut sandstone tunnel, rising in darkness, and emerges inside the castle's defenses. Someone on the inside has unlocked the door at the upper end.

[00:15:24]Edward and his men enter without sound.

[00:15:26]They move through corridors. They find Mortimer's chamber. Isabella is there.

[00:15:32]When she realizes what is happening, she reportedly screams in French, her first language, begging her son to spare her lover. Some accounts record her exact words. "Fair son, have [music] pity on gentle Mortimer."

[00:15:47]Mortimer is bound, gagged, >> [music] >> and dragged back down through the tunnel. He is taken to London, tried, and hanged at Tyburn on the 29th of November, 1330. Edward III goes on to reign for 50 years, overseeing the opening stages of the Hundred Years' War, and becoming one of the most consequential kings in English history.

[00:16:09]All of it begins, in a meaningful sense, in a tunnel under a rock. [music] The tunnel is called Mortimer's Hole today.

[00:16:17]It is 98 m long. You can walk it. The stone walls on either side, cool and slightly damp, are the same walls Edward's men pressed against in the fort. Dark in October [music] 1330, the tunnel was not built for this purpose. It was a service passage, connecting the castle to its supply yard below. But history uses what it finds, >> [music] >> and what it found that night was a hole in the rock that no one outside the castle was supposed to know about, and a 17-year-old king furious enough [music] to use it.

[00:16:50]People say they hear things in that tunnel, footsteps, a voice speaking in French, high and urgent, in a language no one around it speaks. There were reports in 1921 [music] of ghostly sounds near the castle so alarming that residents refused to leave their homes after dark. One man [music] apparently staked out the area overnight and heard footsteps rising from [music] a basement accompanied by the rustling of paper, which then retreated when he called out, "There is an explanation for every ghost. There is always an explanation. Whether the explanation explains everything is, as always, your call." Seven. The city is still growing downward, and this is where it becomes something other than history. As of the spring of 2026, Nottingham's official cave count stands at 1,000. 1,000 recorded, cataloged, surveyed underground spaces beneath a city of around 330,000 people. The count was around 425 as recently as the late 2000s, when the systematic survey effort began in earnest. It more than doubled in roughly 15 years. It is still climbing. City archaeologist Scott Lomax, who has led much of this work, noted in recent statements that caves which were believed to have been destroyed by 20th century development turned out not to have been destroyed at all, only buried deeper, >> [music] >> sealed off, forgotten again, and now rediscovered again. Some of these thousand caves are accessible to the public and have been for decades. Some are beneath private homes, unknown to the people living above them until a survey team knocks on the door with a map and some old estate records. Some lie beneath active commercial properties, pubs, office buildings, [music] shops, whose owners may or may not be aware of what sits 3 m below the floor. The survey team uses historic [music] maps, title deeds, old photographs, ground-penetrating radar, and sometimes just fieldwork [music] and knocking on doors. They are, in a real sense, still excavating Nottingham's past in 2026, [music] not with a spade, but with a spreadsheet and a phone. Stop for [music] a moment and consider what this means. A city that has been continuously occupied since at least the 7th century, that was named "House of Caves" by the 9th century, that was legally renting cave homes until 1845, that has over a thousand documented underground spaces, and is still finding [music] new ones. The city is not done.

[00:19:22]It does not know what it contains.

[00:19:24]People are walking over rooms they have never seen, over tunnels that have not been opened in 200 years, over chambers that were cut by hand, by people whose names were never recorded. The sandstone holds it all patiently.

[00:19:38]It has had 250 [music] million years of practice. The newest cave in the official survey [music] was documented earlier this year. It was beneath a building in the city center.

[00:19:48]The owners [music] were informed. The archaeologists recorded it, measured it, added it to the count, and then they moved on to the [music] next address on the list. 1,000 caves and counting [music] right now. While you are watching this, while Nottingham goes about its day above ground, the city below it gets a little larger every year. Stop for a moment. Look at what [music] we have just seen. A city that was named House of Caves 11 [music] centuries ago, and somehow managed to forget the fact. A sandman who [music] carved a 200-m labyrinth alone, by hand, over 30 years, and died in the workhouse. A medieval tannery cut into living rock, operating in darkness beside the city's drinking water supply.

[00:20:31]Families raising children underground in the legal slums of the car, 19th century, in spaces a previous century had used for storing beer barrels. Beer cellars that have never stopped being beer cellars, generation [music] after generation.

[00:20:46]800 years without interruption. A 98-m tunnel [music] that a teenage king used to arrest his own mother's lover and change the monarchy of England. [music] And a city that is still, today, discovering new rooms beneath its own streets, and has been doing so steadily for the last 15 years, and shows no sign of stopping. [music] What connects all seven of these? Not Robin Hood, not the castle, the rock.

[00:21:13]Nottingham is a city defined by the thing beneath it. Everything that happened here, >> [music] >> the industry, the poverty, the politics, the violence, the survival, happened in relationship to this particular sandstone, this particular softness, this particular willingness to accept a chisel. The rock made things possible that would have been impossible elsewhere. It made homes possible for people who had no other option. It made secrecy [music] possible for people who needed it. It made a coup d'état possible for a teenager who had no army, and it makes discovery possible now, in 2026.

[00:21:50]Because the rock does not decay [music] the way wood and fabric and paper do, what goes into Nottingham's sandstone stays there. The rock remembers.

[00:22:00]The city above it, less reliably. There is something quietly unsettling [music] about that. Not supernatural, just true. Right now, somewhere beneath a street in Nottingham, there is a room [music] that was last used by someone whose name we do not know, for a purpose we have not yet determined. It has been waiting there, sealed and still, for perhaps [music] 200 years, perhaps 500.

[00:22:25]And one day, a surveyor [music] with a map will knock on a door, check the records, and add it to the count. If one of these seven stories stayed with you, [music] tell me which comments. The Sandman's Labyrinth? The families who lived [music] in the rock? The night a teenage king crawled through a tunnel with a sword? I want to know [music] what hit hardest. If you got something out of this, a like is the simplest way to say so, and it helps more people find their way down here. Subscribe if you want the next descent. [music] There are places on this list that make Nottingham look straightforward. More of this to come.