A sk most Londoners if they have ever been to the Silver Vaults on Chancery Lane in the City of London, and the response is a quizzical, “Silver vaults? I’ve never heard of them!” But antiques dealers who buy and sell silverwares know that this subterranean cache of treasures is probably the largest single collection of silver in the world.
The Vaults opened in May 1885 as The Chancery Lane Safe Deposit Company, which leased safety deposit boxes and secure strong rooms for the “safekeeping of plate, jewels, bonds, etc.” It was the second company in Britain to provide secure storage facilities; the first was The National Safe Deposit Company, which had opened in 1872 on Queen Victoria Street, also within the square mile of London’s ancient city. An 1880s advertisement in The Illustrated London News told readers that the vaults of The Chancery Lane Safe Deposit Company, “are built on columns, and are entirely isolated, having patrols or corridors around, over and under them, making it utterly impossible for anyone to approach unobserved. Night watchmen have revolvers.” An 1887 advert in the same publication stated that the company offered 6,000 safes and strong rooms that were guarded day and night by a military patrol and were absolutely fireproof and burglar-proof. In 1893, the company was so confident about its burglarproof facilities and wished their clients to rest assured that their deposits were always completely safe, that it advertised for “a burglar or two” to try their skills! It’s not known if anyone applied for the job.
The underground network of tunnels in which the safe deposits were housed was not originally intended for such a purpose. It was instead part of the early construction of an underground railway (already known as “the tube”), running from west to east underneath the north end of Chancery Lane, with the purpose of rapidly delivering mail from one part of London to another. The tunnel and the little carriages carrying letters and parcels proved unreliable, and in
