The Duke of York Statue and that Doorway

A statue built in the 1830s commemorated the son of a king and served as a popular tourist attraction. Inside 168 narrow steps led upwards to a viewing gallery overlooking St James's Park. So why are there rumours that its doorway in fact leads down, underground to secret tunnels linking either Buckingham Palace or to Whitehall?

For several decades in the 19th century, visitors to the Duke of York Column in London could ascend to the top of a monument for sweeping views across St James’s Park and The Mall. Today the door at its base is closed, the viewing gallery long out of use.

The column commemorates Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany, second son of George III and heir presumptive, who died on 5 January 1827. Formerly Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, and sometimes linked to the “Grand Old Duke of York” nursery rhyme, he oversaw significant military reforms during his career.

The Duke’s reputation was complicated and he resigned as Commander-in-Chief following a scandal involving a mistress. But his reforms to training, organisation and promotion after Britain’s early failures in the French Revolutionary Wars had helped to professionalise the army in the decades before Waterloo.

The Duke of York Column in London England. Engraving by J.Woods after a picture by J.Salmon. Published 1837.( Public domain, Wikimedia Commons)

The column itself was funded largely through subscriptions from army officers, including deduction of a day's pay (whether they liked it or not), alongside other public donations.

Nothing about its construction was secret. An 1829 newspaper account describes work beginning on the parade ground in St James’s Park, where men “under the direction of Mr McIntosh, the well-sinker” bored deep into the ground to find a foundation firm enough to support the structure.

The monument was completed in 1834. It was designed by Benjamin Wyatt and built by the Pimlico stone mason Mr Nowell. Contemporary reports noted it was “of the Tuscan order” and constructed from granite of different colours, all quarried in Aberdeenshire. Rising 124 feet above the Mall, it quickly became one of London’s notable landmarks.

The column was a tourist attraction as well as a memorial. For an admission fee, visitors could climb the staircase to the viewing gallery. In 1859 the cost was 6d.

It wasn't without incident. In May 1850, after a widely reported suicide from the viewing platform, it was closed for a day. By the 1880s the gallery had shut altogether, and it has remained closed ever since.

Secret tunnels

More than a century of closure leaves space for speculation. Since the 1880s, the subterranean world beneath London has transformed. Underground railway lines, communication routes and service tunnels have spread across the capital.

Most intriguing are the ultra secret networks constructed to serve the corridors of power beneath Whitehall. The Whitehall war bunker under the Ministry of Defence cost an estimated £66 million, Parliament was informed in 1993, an overspend of £23 million. Armed Forces Minister Jeremy Hanley said: "The reasons for the cost increase were the inherent technical difficulties of converting the existing deep underground site with restricted access and the difficulty of estimating the costs of such an unprecedented programme."

So with secure routes linking government departments, maybe there is one connecting to the royal residence at Buckingham Palace with access points along the way? 

The door leading inside 
It is an appealing theory but how likely is it in reality? The very public position of this doorway is hardly ideal for royal escapes. And while the viewing gallery is no longer open to the public, it has been accessed. In August 1908, the Bow steeplejack Mr W Larkins carried out work to repair the statue. And in 1938 photographs of the Trooping the Colour were taken from the gallery.

Of course these events took place before first World War II and the Cold War necessitated a new approach to defence, including that hugely expensive bunker. Very close to the monument is another doorway tantalisingly linked to a secret world. In Peter Ackroyd's London Under he writes of a door at the bottom of the Duke of York steps leading from Carlton House Terrace into the Mall and notes "a very large extractor fan is fastened to an adjacent wall."

London does possess hidden spaces beneath its streets. It's tempting to think that sites like this were repurposed to serve that subterranean landscape.



Location: Carlton House Terrace, London SW1, UK

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