There had long been a suspicion that tunnels would exist under the old Paddington Gardens flats which predated the Williamson Student Village. Not least because it was recorded that when Paddington Gardens was built in the 1930s the layout of the 'estate' was designed to avoid underground voids.

Moreover, it had long been possible to read between the lines of a passage in Charles Hand's 1920s notes of the Lancashire & Cheshire Historic Society and come to the conclusion that a property that used to stand at the top corner of Paddington and Highgate Street had tunnels underneath it.

With this in mind, before the demolition of the old flats began, FoWT received permission from the site owner to carry out an exploratory dig at that corner. In the limited time available a crater was dug which revealed an underground wall built with sandstone blocks, dressed with exactly the pattern seen elsewhere in the tunnels.

Some time later a 1925 newspaper article was discovered, describing the LCHS visit and illustrating it with two photographs. The article pinpointed the property above as No. 126 Paddington and reported that the historians "went for nearly a mile before giving up their search for a boundary".

In July 1999, with the cooperation and assistance of Watkin Jones Ltd. and AQH Liverpool Ltd., FoWT carried out a second, larger scale dig on the same corner and finally broke through into this long-lost section of the Williamson tunnels.