Take the Central Line into the middle of London and just before the train arrives at Bank station, something strange happens.
Rather than approaching in a straight line, the tunnel begins to twist and turn round dramatically. The angle of the curve is part of the explanation for why there is an enormous gap between the carriages and the platform at the station – bigger than nearly anywhere else on the network.
Why the curve? Why the gap? The main answer is: the tunnels have to go around the single most intriguing, and least visited place in central London: the Bank of England‘s vaults.
Far deep beneath the ground, right in the heart of the financial district, is a city within a city. Some 40% of the Bank’s floor space is to be found not above ground but under the earth, and at the heart of this underground network is the biggest gold storage facility in Europe.
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There is more gold in the vaults here at the Bank of England than in Fort Knox – more than in any other single place in the world, save for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. And now, for the first time, Sky News has been invited down into the vaults to see them for ourselves.
It almost goes without saying that the security measures to be granted access were thorough in the extreme. We had to pass through a number of gates and steel doors, to be stripped of our phones and any money on us, to turn our cameras off and agree not to divulge the precise mazy path we took from the Bank’s main lobby through to the vault. But once we finally reached the gold, the sight of it was breathtaking.
The Bank has 12 vaults, each of which holds thousands of bars of gold. We filmed in one of them – vault 4 – but caught glimpses of two of the other vaults beyond it, a hint of…
