This mine is huge, the article says "Altogether the mines underground boulevards run to more than 138 miles and increase by 80 metres every week....Plotted on a rigid geometrical grid, they serve an underground area of more than 5 square miles"This mine was once employed to provide salt which was dissolved into brine to preserve food, now the salt is used to fill the gritters for winter. There are no fossils in the mine because the sea which would have been there the same time as the salt was too salty for anything to live in.
Now the carved out space is used to contain all sorts of valuables and not so valuable, from unnamed paintings stored in hidden alleys to doctors notes, to government policies, through to embarrassing relics of our consumerist history, lots of left over indestructible's living their half life's isolation.
There is a company called deepstore http://www.deepstore.com/ which promise to deal with all your storage needs boasting of a climate controlled atmosphere, cost effective storage solution and endless space. It's a bit like one of those government bunkers you hear about hidden beneath the Thames. The author of the article says '"Weird" doesn't cover it. No 5 shaft, down which I am lowered 108 meters into Winsford salt mine standing on the rim of a skip, is an unlikely simulacrum for the back of a wardrobe, but you'd get no bigger shock if you stepped into a Narnia. It's like a journey into the imagination, a place of adventure where any Greek mythologist, never mind a bond script writer, would reach for is pen. You might find the minator down here or Ernst Starvo Blofeld."
All of the above info was taken from The Sunday Times Magazine 25.01.2009, Article: Investigation, Salt Mines
