Two urban explorers searching for buried Victorian alleyways ended up finding a cannabis grow room running underneath the Bristol streets in the United Kingdom.
Matthew Williams and Martin Gavin were picking their way through a buried network of Victorian alleyways when they discovered a hidden cannabis farm. The two each have YouTube channels dedicated to showing off their urban adventures.
“I’ve been looking for this place for literally about 20 years,” said Matthew in the video of the excursion. “This is it, an underground street in Bristol. Everyone wants to know where this is. Ever since I’ve come to Bristol I’ve heard rumors about this and here we are.”
The pair eventually end up near a modern-looking gate with cannabis growing equipment left behind it. After climbing the fence, the two end up finding an abandoned cannabis grow that still smelled of cannabis. Next to that, the two urban explorers found a small underground workshop with a woodworking machine as well as a working kitchen and bathroom. After happening upon a small hatch covered in plasterboard, the two found an active grow site with dozens of cannabis plats propagating under bright lights.
At the beginning of the posted video, the explorers explain that people went back a week after they had initially stumbled upon the grow and had taken away some of the evidence of the active grow. They said they left a few months in between their trip to the underground grow and the posting of the video in order to make sure whoever was working underground was able to get rid of everything they wanted to get rid of. Urban explorers tend to have such luck when out exploring, with another urban explorer discovering an abandoned cannabis operation within a Scottish pub, sharing the find to a group with over 13,000 members. Cannabis being grown in secret is not surprising as it is yet to be fully legalized everywhere, leading to secret cannabis grows in all parts of the world.
While the explorers searched for buried Victorian alleyways, cannabis use dates back to the Victorian era, initially considered a medicine after being brought to Britain in the 1800s. William O’Shaughnessy, a young doctor who signed up for the British East India Company where he learned cannabis had been used as a clinical remedy for thousands of years. O’Shaughnessy successfully used cannabis to treat arthritis pain and convulsions from tetanus, leading to one of the first scientific papers regarding cannabis use, “Case of Tetanus, Cured by a Preparation of Hemp (the Cannabis indica).” He returned to England a few years later and continued to study and spread the word of cannabis and its medicinal uses.
While O’Shaughnessy mainly studied the therapeutic effects of cannabis on physical ailments, others were studying the other medicinal benefits of cannabis. French psychiatrist Jacques-Joseph Moreau studied the effects of cannabis and used it to treat mental illness, prescribing it a as sleep aid as well as an appetite stimulant. Moreau believed cannabis could be a way to quiet self-destructive thoughts and even foster healing from past traumas.
The United Kingdom’s first legal cannabis farm was opened in 2019 by England-based Sativa Investments, but the location was also kept a secret for security purposes.
“One of the problems we had is a security issue where three of the local hoodlums from Frome spotted the fields from afar and started dancing around with their cameras and published that on Facebook, which prompted us to plough the crop into the ground very quickly,” said Geremy Thomas is chief executive officer at Sativa Investments.
