· Council gives planning permission for stable yard site

On 16th February, delegates of Liverpool City Council granted formal planning permission to the property developer to go ahead and build student flats on the site of the old Lord Mayor's Stable Yard. FWT representatives voiced our concerns at the meeting. These were centred around lack of guarantees over saving any tunnels found; lack of access for future excavation; lack of disabled access to the two tunnels to be spared; question marks over availability of funding, etc.. Forty-eight other parties lodged objections, including the local MEP objecting about the threat to the tunnels, the Save Our City campaign objecting to the loss of the historic stables, Merseyside Police objecting to traffic arrangements and many individuals objecting to the threat to the tunnels, inadequacy of the developer's survey, etc.. However, we had heard that instructions had come in advance from the upper echelons to pass the proposal no matter what. Enthusiasts are now pinning hope on the quality of the 'watching brief' (a set of guidelines on what tunnels to look out for and what to do when they are found) to be drawn up by the County Archaeologist and applied during building work. We discussed this matter with the County Archaeologist a couple of days after the planning decision in order to express our concerns about the need to cater for features such as the hitherto unacknowledged 'triple decker' tunnel, which runs right under the stable yard. In the meantime, we may expect to see the majority of the Lord Mayor's stables demolished any time in the near future.

· FWT Open Meeting

Our Open Meeting was held on the frosty evening of 11th February. Thanks to all those who came and, hopefully, enjoyed the slides, video and discussions. A good number of new tunnel enthusiasts joined FWT on the night. Our thanks also to Devonshire House for the free use of the conference facilities.

· Award for FWT web site

We were thrilled to hear that this web site has been awarded the 'Best of the Web' award from the worldwide Urban Adventure Group (hence the new graphic on the home page). Those chaps have a very good site of their own (see our Links page) so it's very pleasing for our humble efforts on this site to be acknowledged.

· Major discoveries at Paddington Gardens

After years of our claims of Williamson structures existing under Paddington Gardens falling on deaf ears, the proof was literally found during our monitoring of the clearance work on the site in recent weeks. Acting under an archaeological brief, the contractors dug into several areas of the floor and revealed several significant Williamson underground structures. The Liverpool Echo featured us and the discovery in an article in early February. The photo below left shows a cavern which has had most of its arched roof knocked in but which has doorways and is several layers deep. On the end of the lines is one of our cavers, in the second level down, where he could see the top of the wall of the a third layer. Just to the right of this was the are shown in the photo on the left. Here, excavation didn't go far down but we did find a set of curving sandstone steps disappearing into the rubble. Several other major features were opened up to lesser degrees during the our time allotted (the developers of this site are working to deadlines) and we are sure of others yet to be found. It is beginning to appear that the 'traditional' long narrow tunnels one always hopes to find are, in the case of Paddington Gardens, located far below the land surface, with these major 'junctions' at various crossover points. We must thank the developer for their cooperation and are in discussions at present regarding the preservation of the structures found and future access to them.