Arranging this station proved to be one of the stiffest bits of engineering work ever attempted. Drain-pipes were ubiquitous--a perfect tangle that had to be diverted. There were old disused and long-forgotten pipes, electric cables, hydraulic power pipes, pneumatic tubes, gas and water mains--a maze and wilderness of underground communications. These were all rearranged in a special pipe-tunnel, 14 feet wide. Then, at a depth of about 20 feet, the booking-office was built, bit by bit, of steel-work, which had previously been temporarily put together in a field to ensure its fitting exactly into the excavation prepared for its accommodation--an area 145 feet one way and 75 feet the other, its outline being on the curve. Its roof, consisting of girders supporting steel troughing, was filled up with concrete, and finally with asphalte, upon which thousands of people pass daily without realising what is below them. Access to the booking-office is gained by numerous entrances _viâ_ the public subway: two on the Royal Exchange pavement, two at the bottom of Mansion House Place, one at the Poultry corner, and one at Walbrook, one in front of the Safe Deposit City buildings, two each at the corners of Princes Street and Cornhill, and one at St. Mary Woolnoth Church. The entire arrangement reminds one of a mole’s subterranean fortress, with its galleries for entrance and exit branching off in various directions. These subways, immense conveniences which should be adopted at every _rond-point_ in London--though it is a strange fact that _habitués_ of the City seldom use them, they being patronised chiefly by the “work-girl” and by casual visitors to the central “square mile”--are 15 feet wide and 9 feet high, are lined with glazed brick, and have electric-lighted stairways at the above-mentioned places. DESCRIPTION OF THE RAILWAY Some fifty feet below the Bank of England Station are the twin-tunnels and their platforms, approached by five lift shafts of twenty feet, and one stairway shaft of eighteen feet diameter; at a deeper level still are the tubes of the City and South London Railway, crossing the City _en route_ to Islington. These great passenger lifts work with wonderful smoothness (_facile descensus Averno est_), and without them no fewer than ninety-three steps would have to be painfully descended.