Guardian Underground Telephone Exchange

Here is a 'working paper' draft of an article on the Cold War era underground telecommunications infrastructure in central Manchester. It was co-written with Richard Brook and derived from a chapter in our 2012 Infra_MANC exhibition catalogue. The article has been accept for publication by the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society but might take a good few months (or longer?) before the next issue of their Transactions gets released.

A plan Richard drew of the central cable and equipment tunnels lying under China Town in the city centre is shown above. It is quite an extensive underground space, as indicated by the photograph below showing the distances to the ends of the cable tunnels from the central core. More historic photos of the construction of the Guardian Exchange in the 1950s can be seen on George Coney's useful Cold War History in Manchester web pages.  

A view of the Guardian cable tunnels, 
taken by English Heritage in 1998.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Managing Your Online Persona, Part I

by Brandon Giles (republished from his personal blog ) Why Care? It is becoming more important than ever to actively manage your persona on the internet, particularly if you operate in the fields of entrepreneurship, venture capital or marketing. In general, persona management is more crucial in industries where your value and success depends on personal human capital and others perception of that value. However, digital footprints have a material impact on everyone. Beginning back in 2007, an ExecuNet survey  found that 83% of recruiters already used internet searches to evaluate job candidates, with 43% of recruiters eliminating candidates because of what they found. “How-to” Guide As an aspiring entrepreneur I sought to learn more about the tools, platforms and best practices before busting out onto the Blogging scene. I heard from nearly every guest in my Launching Tech Ventures entrepreneurship course at the Harvard Business School (#hbsltv) that blogging was critical to estab...
Read more

Letting it Go

by Anthemos Georgiades There are various lessons I could have discussed here regarding the UX tests I ran for my startup Zumper. But, instead, I am going to focus on one challenge that these tests created for me: my ability – or lack thereof – to let my own opinions and intuitions drop. In the three lean tests that I ran, two of them confirmed something I had suspected. The third one however did not. In my ‘banner’ test, I tested (1) the price users thought a standard bed frame was worth, under three different themes of page banners and then (2) if the user could actually remember the site’s name after use. I found that what I considered to be the most ‘boring’ white and grey banner drove the highest price estimations from users and beat our other two banners hands-down on brand recollection. I had actually only included this ‘boring’ banner in the lean test as a control. My hypothesis had been that our green banner would drive the best engagement given that this was the predominan...
Read more

Creating the “Next Big Thing": How to Inspire Innovation

By Brad Bonnett  How do I apply all my learning’s about lean startups such as finding product market fit with a minimum viable product if I don’t have an initial problem that I am trying to solve?  I know that I want to build something that changes the world but I continue to struggle to find what product or service I want to build.  During our class with Fred Wilson he said that “If you have an idea that you can't get out of your head, do a startup. Otherwise join a startup.”  Although I appreciate the simplicity of this view and the experience that Fred brings to the table I am dismayed to think that unless I stumble upon an idea that really sticks with me I am going to be excluded from starting my own company.  Therefore I tried to put together a process that can help inspire innovation for those of us who are lacking an idea to create that “next big thing!” I tried to take the best practices that I have learned from my Managing Innovation class at HBS and ...
Read more