Explore The Hidden World Beneath Your Feet In The New Book From Higgypop Creator Steve Higgins

By Steve Higgins
January 03, 2023 1:00 AM ‐ BooksUndergroundUrbEx

This article is more than one year old.

Due for release in early 2023, 'Hidden, Forbidden & Off-Limits' is the new book from Steve Higgins, that charts his many adventures into some of Britain's most fascinating dark and forgotten places.

Steve Higgins - Hidden, Forbidden & Off-Limits
As the founder of Higgypop.com, you probably know me best for the content I produce related to the paranormal, but there's actually a few other content strands on the website. My pages on urban exploration are also popular, especially the features relating to the secret underground bunkers I've researched and explored over the years.

In fact, the underground content actually came before paranormal, having been launched back in 2002. So, it's about time my story was told. 'Hidden, Forbidden & Off-Limits' is the new book from me, Steve Higgins. The ebook is available to pre-order now and will be released along with the paperback and hard cover versions on February 2, 2023.

It's my story of exploring the unknown worlds and hidden landscapes beneath our feet, from subterranean World War II ammunition stores, to massive Cold War nuclear bunkers. It's also about the fascinating history I uncovered while exploring in the darkness and the people I met along the way.

It's a tale that starts inside the abandoned stone quarries of Wiltshire, where the Ministry of Defence still hides some of their biggest secrets to this day. The tunnels were put on the map by ufologists and conspiracy theorists who were convinced that the tunnels had clandestine links to secret government UFO programmes.

Urban exploration and the paranormal often goes hand in hand, perhaps because old abandoned buildings are creepy, and creepy places make good locations for ghost stories. In fact, there are some in my book, like the time I went searching for spooks with a paranormal team in a former underground aircraft factory.

There was also the time that my knowledge of secret underground spaces attracted the attention of a psychic medium who was helping a desperate family search for the body of a missing person at the centre of a high profile murder case that made national news - that didn't work out too well for her.

At its heart 'Hidden, Forbidden & Off-Limits' is a deep-dive into the world of underground exploration, a subset of urban exploration, a closely related pastime which involves exploring and photographing decaying and forgotten structures. Over the last two decades I've visited many formerly secret underground spaces, learnt about the history of many others, and was even given the very rare honour of becoming one of just a handful of civilians to visit the holy grail of British bunkers, a formerly top secret bunker in Wiltshire known as Burlington.
Steve Higgins In Burlington

The pursuit of hidden, forbidden and off-limits places briefly put me in the spotlight, and I became fairly well known within that niche world. I was interviewed about bunkers by BBC Radio 4 and various local stations, and even had full-page spreads written about me in The Guardian and The Times. The latter led with the introduction, "urban explorer Steve Higgins avoids anti-trespass barriers and bats to descend into one of the abandoned tunnels near Bath that even people living nearby barely know exists." There was also a chapter written about me in British journalist, Stephen Smith's 2010 book 'Underground England', in which I was referred to simply by the anonymous initial, 'N'.
Steve Higgins BBC Radio 4 Interview

In 'Hidden, Forbidden & Off-Limits', you'll be taken to an underground store in the Wiltshire countryside that's the size of 18 football pitches and is used to store over 800,000 cases of very fancy wine. Explore the world's biggest underground factory that operated in total secrecy during WWII, but what secrets does it hide today? And examine the conspiracy theories that link a vast network of MOD tunnels with extraterrestrials and the UK's Trident nuclear weapons system - but is there any truth in these outlandish claims?

All this comes nicely wrapped up as a paperback or hard back, with a cover designed by Haunted Magazine's talented designer Andy Soar and a foreword kindly written by the legendary urban explorer and self-proclaimed "bunker buster" Matthew Williams. 'Hidden, Forbidden & Off-Limits' will also be available as an ebook for Amazon Kindle.

'Hidden, Forbidden & Off-Limits' by Steve Higgins will be released in paperback, hard cover and for Kindle on February 2, 2023. The digital ebook is available to pre-order now.
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