The 1,000 diggers 'buried' beneath London

Hundreds of abandoned mini diggers apparently lie buried beneath London. The madness of it speaks for itself.

Here is a must-read article for you about London houses.

You'll have heard about the way in which the rich are digging down to create basements and super basements under their houses.You'll have heard about the planning fees some of them have had to pay; about the swimming pools, gyms and cinemas; and you will have heard about the disruption to their neighbours' peace.

But I wonder if you have thought about how it is done.

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Ed Smith explains in the article. You somehow get a mini digger or two through your back doors or windows (just about possible without destroying the entire structure of the house). Then you dig.

But you then have the problem of having a digger that has dug itself so deep, it can't drive out again (diggers can't go up spiral staircases). So what do you do?

You could get in a crane and lift it out, but these diggers are only worth £6,000 or so, and cranes don't come cheap in central London.

So, it turns out you get it to dig another hole big enough for it to fit into. Then you cover it up with a bit of gravel and a pouring of concrete and you leave it there.

The result? There are some 1,000 diggers buried in London (assuming this isn't a joke surely it is worth dismantling the diggers for scrap if they can't come out whole).

And developers are now coming across a second generation problem: when they go in to dig another basement level down, their path is blocked by "abandoned diggers from the last round of improvements."

This is clearly financially rational to a degree why pay more to recover something than it is worth on the open market. But it is also completely bonkers given that the average basement cinema is very unlikely to ever be actually used. Sacrificing the country's mini diggers to create them seems rather unproductive.

If anyone has any evidence that the above story (first read in the New Statesman) is nonsense, please do let us know. We have our doubts.

Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.