Absurdly Spacious Sewer

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Did someone call a plumber?

Iwata: Wow, I never knew sewer tunnels were so wide and spacious. Watanabe: But what's strange is how nice it smells down here. —Excel Saga

In real life, most modern sanitary sewers consist of pipes too small for an adult to enter. They typically range from 10 centimeters in diameter coming from individual properties, to maybe 60 to 70 centimeters (roughly two feet) in the street. Even these largest ones can at best only be crawled through, and then only if they are currently empty. Older sewer systems frequently consist of underground canals with relatively narrow walkways on the side.

Very few creatures, humans especially, would actually be able to survive in sewers for any extended length of time. It's pitch black (sewer workers bring their own lighting), very chilly even in the summer, and there's little oxygen and a plethora of noxious gases from sewage, making the air highly unsuitable for breathing (exposure to methane and hydrogen sulfide is a frequent hazard to workers).

Sewers featured in video games and any other form of fiction, however, are usually absurdly spacious underground canals with ample room to move, often enabling characters to avoid stepping into the actual sewage (often a good thing, since in many games, contact with sewer water is inherently harmful). These underground passages have more in common with the catacombs of Paris than any actual sewer system. The dim lighting, labyrinthine passages, and resident rats and alligators provide the perfectly suitable setting for heroes to chase criminals and/or monsters through. Occasionally, the place is so big people elect it as their home. It's not unusual to find whole shanty towns built in ludicrously large sewer or ex-sewer canals. And somehow there's always adequate lighting, warmth, and breathable air. Presumably, there's no bodily waste down there because Nobody Poops.

It is also often connected to a multitude of locations throughout an urban area, accessed through easily removable manholes, occasionally granting access directly into otherwise secure buildings: a perfect way for suspicious types to travel without detection (and of course, no one will be later alerted by powerful odours, either).

For an alternate route, see the Air Vent Passageway. May coincide with the much narrower Sinister Subway, and both are generally connected to the all-encompassing Dungeon Town. All but standard for The Alcatraz. Don't forget the Abandoned Maintenance Tunnels.

Real life spacious sewers do exist. See IAMA Drainer; note also that storm drainage systems, which are quite spacious, are sometimes called "sewers", thus explaining at least some versions of this trope.

For whole levels set in sewers, see Down the Drain. Compare Unnecessarily Large Interior.

Examples of Absurdly Spacious Sewers include:

Anime and Manga

• Digimon Adventure managed to fit this trope. Despite, you know, a lack of any reason for sewers to exist in the digital world. But then, that's the digital world for you.
  • Considering that the digital world includes such gems of architecture as an upside-down, physics-defying pyramid, an improbably large sewer is the least of their engineering problems.
• The sewers of Mid-Childa in Lyrical Nanoha were large enough for the Forwards to have an all-out battle against a swarm of Mecha-Mooks, a summoner, and her allies.
• One episode of Excel Saga had everybody traveling in a large sewer underneath F City, all the while being stalked by Puchuus.
  • Which is based on a chapter in the original manga, minus the Puchuus. It makes sense that the sewers would be large, since they have to accommodate ACROSS's headquarters.
• Heat Guy J featured an underground sewer city that leached off of the technologically advanced city above. It was freer, pleasant and considerably more crowded than other examples listed in this trope. (Which is strange, as one would think illness and death would be rampant in a crowded, airless city situated next to a river of raw sewage.)
• In Bleach, the only reason Ichigo survived so long was because he was able to move around in Seireitei's ungodly huge sewer system.
  • Although they were also supply routes, which makes a bit more sense.
    • And keep in mind that the non-Shinigami members of Soul Society do not need to eat. Which, while not quite at Nobody Poops level, it's more like 5% percent poops.
• Episode 31 of Sailor Moon has a chase lead into one of these. At least the smell gets remarked upon.
  • While a cat did it get stuck in there, it was really big, due to being a crystal carrier.
  • Once Luna has pushed the large cat into the pipe, Zoicite has no problems following them, which is lampshaded in the abridged series:

Zoicite: I defy physics!

• Used plausibly in Berserk, as they're under a rather large castle/fortified town in around the time large sewer tunnels would have been built. Also avoids the "hero doesn't actually have to walk in the sewage" thing, because it's weird to imagine someone fighting for their lives while caked with poop from the knees down. Realistic, though.
• The sewer system under Mahora in Mahou Sensei Negima is huge. Huge enough for people to have battles against groups of Mecha-Mooks and Spider Tanks. There's even a massive, cavernous room there that contained an entire invading army of those plus a few Humongous Mecha.
• Ashford Academy's water distribution tunnels in Code Geass are ridiculously huge, considering it only services the school.
• In Fullmetal Alchemist, Ran Fan escapes through the sewers of Central after she and Ling fight Wrath. Scar is also shown traversing sewers on multiple occasion. However, this may be Justified Trope as the city, including sewer networks, has been created entirely under the rule of Father, and the sewers connect to his underground base.
• The sewer network under the imperial capital in Pumpkin Scissors is big enough that it contains as many people as the city above. Also, you can drive and drift in it.
• Spice and Wolf features a sewer system big enough to fit a massive wolf in, with enough room left over for said wolf to fight a group of soldiers. This is somewhat justified as they were originally built the the church to use as escape routes.
• Pokémon episode ""Leading A Stray!" (The Stray Hoeruko!)". Ash and friends travel through a sewer large enough for a Wailmer to swim in.
• The firing range that the main characters of Noir use for target practice is a bulls-eye chalked onto the wall of a sewer tunnel. Given that nobody in the series mentions that they smell funny, they must have found a highly effective brand of soap.
• In one episode of Kimba the White Lion, Kimba accidentally gets himself lost in the sewer system in Paris and then has to fight an elderly leopard that has been thought as a monster living in the sewers.

Comic Books

• As mentioned above, the New York (and London, and Chicago) sewers are home to the Morlocks in X-Men.
  • The original Morlock Tunnels in New York were not sewers or storm drains at all, but a long-abandoned Army construction project originally intended to serve as a mass fallout shelter and then abandoned partway through construction due to cancellation of funding.
  • Played straight in the X-Men Legends RPG, in which the Morlock Tunnels are a sewer system, though it seems to be a storm sewer rather than a sanitary sewer.
  • There's also a subfaction of Morlocks who tunnel through the earth nomadically, presenting the flipside to the drain dwellers' coin.
  • Ultimate Marvel's Morlocks have intentionally expanded their tunnels into an Elaborate Underground Base, complete with hydroponic gardens powered by a mutant's electrical abilities.
• During a period in Superman comics when Applied Phlebotinum had reinvented Metropolis as a 64th century ultra-city, the sewers were a vast network of extremely clean looking waterways, patrolled by genetically engineered creatures who consumed the city's waste and tasted like chicken. Also, a homeless guy who'd found a rubber dinghy and an outboard motor on a pole and reinvented himself as the mythic archetype of the Ferryman.
• In the Batman comics, Gotham City has a spacious and labyrinthine sewer system that often serves as a base of operation to villains such as Killer Croc and the Rat-Catcher.
  • Also, in The Long Halloween, Solomon Grundy and Two-Face.
    • It's sequel Batman: Dark Victory has Two-Face, Joker, Scarecrow, Mr. Freeze, Poison Ivy...yeah, basically the sewers are large enough to be a small town.
  • This is sometimes blamed on a lack of proper planning permission system.
    • Said sewers are also connected to the Batcave (and one issue of Batman/Superman shows that this entrance is guarded by Alfred with a shotgun, leaving Superman to remark "You didn't have a spare Mr. Freeze gun you could've loaned him?"). Those sewer accesses are always big enough to accommodate the Batmobile, Batsub and the Batboat moving at outright irresponsible speeds.
    • In fact in Batman: Dark Victory, Two-Face and his gang actually stumble into the Batcave by accident, after fleeing through the sewers from their compromised base.
• In the "What If?" type story, The Punisher Kills The Marvel Universe, the Punisher's first victims are Spider-Man and Venom, who are fighting in a sewer. Spider-Man is actually able to jump around (Meaning he flies over Venom's head by a good five feet) in the sewer.
  • Yet the reason Punisher picks them off there is because they'd have no room to manouver..
• In issue #23 of the original Wolverine ongoing series, Wolverine has trapped General Coy and Prince Baran in the Madripoor sewers. There is apparently enough room for all three to run around without crouching or bumping into things, and Wolverine is able to leap at his two enemies to scare them into running.
• Every single incarnation of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, where they have 2-5 bedrooms, a living room, kitchen, a training area, and a garage for the Turtle Van (let's not think about the blimp for now...). It's unclear if Splinter's meditation room and Don's workshop are part of their bedrooms or separate, but the latter's easy to picture considering how huge their underground palace already is. The sewers that aren't part of their lair are practical rivers so large they can often pilot a swamp-style hovercraft through them.
  • Although the sewers in almost every section of the TMNT franchise resemble the real-life New York storm drain system more than any sewer, and it wouldn't be the first time people have gotten the two terms confused.
  • Some incarnations (like movies past the first) place the Turtles' palace in an abandoned subway station, with the Van being stored in nearby abandoned warehouses. However, those locations are always connected to the sewer system, and said sewers are inevitably big enough for the Turtles (especially Michelangelo) to be able to skate and do half-pipes in the sewer pipes.
• In the Hellboy spin-off Lobster Johnson: The Iron Prometheus, the Lobster is able to travel by boat through the New York sewer system. And it's mentioned that there is a subterranean cannibal tribe, though not a bad as the ones under London and Paris.
• The Eel would make his lair in one of these (seriously, the ceiling has got to be like fifteen feet high) in early Marvel Comics, laying low after his defeat by the Human Torch in his first appearance.
• Nodwick once found ^{[dead link]} enough of space in one to hang a lampshade:

Yeagar: The sewer system is big enough for you guys to crawl through it? Artax: Crawl through? are you kidding? The sewer caverns are huge! You'd almost think the town had been trying to cause the bar's foundation to cave in and wash everything out to sea. Barman: Gee, with my upstanding clientele? Go figure.

• The sewers of Sin City are apparently pretty large. Marv is able to swim through them via the harbor and make it to anothe rpart of town in The Long Goodbye. Dwight, meanwhile, takes on an IRA mercenary in the sewers in The Big Fat Kill.
• In The Beano the Ratz appear to live in a sewer large enough for a number of things and the sewer enables them to easily get into the houses of humans. However the sewers have never been shown to be large enough to fit humans down them.

Film

• In Flushed Away we see the sewers only from the rats' perspective, but for their purposes, at least, the sewer is large enough for an entire sprawling city.
• Shrek the Third. This is justified because it was a secret escape route connected to the palace in case of attack.
• Shua flees the Ecoban law enforcement at the start of Sky Blue. His path takes him through both an Absurdly Spacious Sewer system and the the Air Vent system.
• The secret hideout of the cat gang in An American Tail. Justified for being in New York City in 1885 (they were that big back then) and that from the viewpoints of cats and mice everything is bigger.
• The Gypsies in Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame all live inside a giant sewer system located underneath the streets of medieval Paris. Unfortunately, Frollo actually knows where that location is...
• In Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, the town of Gunnison's sewer system is big enough for two grown men to walk through easily, has ducts big enough for chestbursters to hide in, is easy to access by both humans and xenomorphs, and is the setting of a major fight scene between a Predator and two xenomorphs.
  • "Is that a couch?...Its better than ours!"
• In Blade II, the sewers underneath the city are HUGE. So big, in fact, that scores of Reavers can stand wall to wall.
• In The Third Man, the spacious sewers of Vienna play a vital role. The ending of the film was largely shot in the city's real sewers, and features the villain being chased by a Real Life squad of policemen that existed for the sole purpose of patrolling its sewers!
• Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett search for their assistant Toby in one of these, which is also featured in the title sequence. While this sewer system is large enough for them to walk upright in, it's also described as being the source of the unusually foul smells of Mrs. Lovett's bakery.
  • In the original Sweeney Todd story, "The String of Pearls", the tunnels below Fleet Street were how Sweeney got the bodies of his victims to Mrs. Lovett for baking into pies, since her pie shop was right across the street from his barbershop. Previously, he'd had a good number of dead dudes down there, since he dispatched his victims by using a trick barber's chair to dump them into his basement, taking his razor to any who survived the fall. And unlike the musical, this eventually got the two of them caught when the Bow Street Runners investigated.
• According to the Korean monster film The Host, most of the sewers in Seoul are big enough for torchlight not to be seen on the roof—or, for that matter, for a big freaking tadpole monster to charge through them.
  • Justified Trope: it is set in Korea, which gets at least half a dozen typhoons a year. (Not to mention it is raining a lot in the film.)
  • Ditto Chicago's sewers, big enough to comfortably house a twenty-foot long Alligator.
  • Yes, pretty justified in Korea, home of the Fan Death.
• The excellent Film Noir Walked by Night was the first movie to film in Los Angeles enormous storm drains.
• The pipe systems in The Matrix series are described as sewers which are big enough for whole hovercrafts to comfortably navigate through them, and an entire city inhabited by thousands of people in its lower depths. The sewers were the only remains of the human cities destroyed in the war with the machines.
  • And that's just in "The Desert Of The Real". The Matrix itself has a sewer system beneath the Mega-City that rivals the Mines of Moria—chambers hundreds of feet wide and deep connected by twisty catacomb-like tunnels.
• If you thought Alien was the first movie to have creepy monsters being stalked through dark tunnels with flamethrowers, you're wrong. The classic B&W 1954 sci-fi movie Them climaxes with a hunt through the Los Angeles storm sewer system (including jeeps with mounted machine-guns) for the giant radioactive ants.
  • This film is parodied in a sidequest in Fallout 3 called Those!, where the player has to kill radioactive, fire-breathing ants in a similarly abandoned sewer system (which the game is rife with.)
    • Actually, the underground structures you explore are Metro tunnels, which would kind of explain all of the broken down subway cars.
• The catacombs in Venice in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. They don't really look like sewers, and they're called catacombs. And then Indy climbs out of a manhole.
  • This is justified, as several Real Life documentaries state that the catacombs in Venice have access through manhole covers to pipes running through them at points form the sewer system...
• The catacombs in Istanbul in From Russia with Love. While big enough for James Bond and his current girl to navigate through, they are extremely cramped as well.
• Dutch Film Amsterdamned had the hero police investigator investigate (that's what Police investigators do... investigate...) the source of the bad guy maniac killer's hidden hidey hole... which was a gigantic piece of sidewalk with a pseudo-canal right next to it, obviously filmed on a filmset cause Amsterdam doesn't even have sewers like that, unlike Paris. Mind you, it was filmed in Utrecht, a different city with canals.
• Averted in the 1990s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films; the Turtles are clearly walking through storm drains, not sanitary sewers. Their home base is an abandoned control station, so while there are a couple rooms, they're small rooms. Their gigantic lair in the second movie is a deserted "subway" station (Actually it looks more like a Pneumatic Transit station with a subway car parked inside), not a sewer at all.
• In Demolition Man, the "Wasteland" is the underground sewer system that is home to San Angeles' undesirables. Justified as most of Wasteland is the ruins of Los Angles after a great earthquake.
• In Ladyhawke, Phillipe Gaston (a.k.a. "the Mouse") escapes from a dungeon via its sewer. Played straight in that the sewer is only just big enough for a child, and even then the guard who finds him gone expresses disbelief. However, a real medieval dungeon would not have a sewer of any size at all.
• The catacombs in Metropolis approach this, especially with the scene in the massive cathedral-esque underground chamber where Maria holds her religious meetings. Which begs the question... how the hell did Joh Fredersen manage to completely miss this system of catacombs while building the city, large parts of which—such as the machine rooms, subway, and worker's quarters—are underground?
• Cthulhu. A scene beneath the fictional town of Rivermouth was filmed in the real-life Seattle Catacombs, where one of the producers used to work as a tour guide.
• The Jeffries Tubes in Star Trek are always just big enough to crawl through—except in Star Trek V the Final Frontier, where they're the size of subway tunnels.
• S.W.A.T. has a ridiculously roomy sewer in the last chase scene.
• In Plunkett and Macleane the title characters use large sewer tunnels to escape the law on several occassions.
• One of the locations of the floating crap game in Guys and Dolls, and remarkably clean, too.
• Seen in the film The Fugitive. Might be justified as this is out in the country rather than the city.
• Seen in Batman Returns.
• The movie Creep is a horror movie that starts in the London Underground, and the resident monster was living in a secret Abandoned Hospital but there is your fair share of spacious sewers including one section where he keeps humans in large submerged cages with a catwalk above them.
  • A lot of it was filmed in real, albeit decommissioned, sections of the London Underground, standing in for various bits of underground weirdness. Some sections of the network have been disused for the better part of a century now, and are beginning to look as run down and grotty as a viewer would expect the sewers to look.
• Averted in the film El Norte. Two siblings from Guatemala want to get to the US. They're in Mexico, and the only safest, fastest route was through an old sewer pipe. Not only is it small and smelly and they have to crawl on their hands and knees most of the way, but it's full of rats. Disease-ridden rats.
• In Disney's Hocus Pocus, Max, Dani and Allison have to flee the witches and zombie Billy Butcherson by following Thackery into the sewers, which are filled with spiders and rats, which is what Thackery eats as a cat! Very squicky to the trio.
• Averted in The Shawshank Redemption, which has Dufresne escape from prison by tunneling a hole in his cell wall and breaking into a sewer pipe that happened to be right next to it. It's big enough for him to crawl through, but not stand up in; and the film doesn't exactly portray crawling through raw sewage as healthy either.

Gamebook

• The Lone Wolf gamebook series contains a few Absurdly Spacious Sewers, most notably the Baga-darooz in Barrakeesh, capital of Vassagonia. This sewer is vast enough to house giant lizards and other nasty monsters, and criminals can be condemned to be locked within. Unlike some other fantasy examples, however, it is described as extremely filthy, smelly and insalubrious—just getting an open wound in contact with the water can give you a horrible disease.
  • As in, "Race Against the Clock to get the next Plot Coupon before you have to hack off the infected arm and/or die screaming."

Literature

• Clare Clark's historical novel The Great Stink is all about building an improved London sewer system.
• Three Hands in the Fountain by Lindsey Davis (a historical mystery set in Ancient Rome in A.D. 73) is about the hunt for a Serial Killer who dumps the bodies of his victims into Rome's formidable aqueduct system.
• In Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere the entire fantasy world of London Below exists in the sewers and underground railway tunnels beneath London. However, this is not too implausible; see Real Life section. (It's also implied that much of the London Below doesn't exist in the "real world".)
• In Stephen King's IT, crucial events (in both time periods) occur in the sewers under Derry, which feature pipes big enough for adults to walk in without having to bend down, and chambers large enough for multiple adults to have plenty of elbow room.
  • They call them sewers, but if I'm not mistaken, they were really storm drains, which are big enough to walk through.
  • Call them whatever you like, they're also apparently big enough to have a friendly gang bang in.
• By contrast, there's Stephen King's Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, later filmed as The Shawshank Redemption. Andy Dufresne does get out via a sewer ... but it's a much smaller one than those in It.
• In Garth Nix's Shade's Children, which takes place After the End, the sewer system is the primary path of transportation for La Résistance. Averted very slightly by the fact that the difficulties of walking in a curved pipe and the danger of sudden floods are addressed.
• In Eric Nylund's A Game of Universe, some action happens in a sewer, but since there are no walkways they have to do a lot of wading/swimming.
• Discworld:
  • In the novel Men at Arms, the characters venture into the capacious sewers of Ankh-Morpork. As in the Futurama example below, this is partly justified because some segments of the sewers are older incarnations of the city itself, now buried and paved over. In fact the sewer system itself was paved over, with the modern-day residents oblivious to the fact that it ever existed.

Detritus: In Ankh-Morpork even the shit have a street to itself. Truly, this a land of opportunity.

• • The entirety of Ankh-Morpork is built on the slowly sinking ruins of its past, making it extremely easy for the native/non-native dwarves to tunnel under the city. Morpork doesn't build out from urban sprawl, it builds UP, and then sinks farther and farther.
    • In The Truth, Sacharissa Cripslock explains the phenomenon to some dwarfs while availing themselves of the exact same eccentricity of architecture. Basically, Ankh-Morpork is (somewhere down there) built on soft loam. Gradually, slowly, not so you'd notice until you tripped on the sidewalk, the sturdy foundations of the city sank ever deeper into the ground. At certain points in the city's history, street level was a full story above the entrances of the buildings; ladders and tunnels were used to get across the street. The Author's Note at the beginning explains that this is based on Seattle, below.
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Justified somewhat because the Chamber's creator was one of Founders of Hogwarts, who meant it to be accessible both by a person and by a giant monster. That, and it's magic.
• Neal Shusterman's young adult novel Downsiders is about a secret community of people who live underneath New York City and are forbidden to go "topside."
• In the early Neal Stephenson book The Big U, devoted role-playing gamers would enter the sewers to game, with the help of a mainframe computer and a form of Mission Control acting as DM. (See the Mazes & Monsters entry below.)
• In The War Between the Pitiful Teachers and the Splendid Kids, a spacious sewer inhabited by the Bookworms (smart kids and teacher's pets) is the last refuge of the Kid Hero.
• The most realistic examples would include the book 'Felidae on the Road', where protagonist Francis encounters a tribe that lives in the sewers. Justified in that they are cats (and dogs) and so are small enough, they are described as being filthy and the smell down there being noxious, they eat sewer rats, and they have gone blind from the constant darkness of the sewers.
• In Les Misérables, when Valjean and Marius escape through the sewers of Paris. However, as shown by the Real Life entry below—and a very lengthy passage in the book itself—the Paris sewers are really like that.
  • This is mentioned in World War Z. Apparently it made cleaning up the zombies a real bitch.
• The entire plot of the book Montmorency revolved around an escaped criminal robbing some of London's richest citizens, then escaping through the sewers. The spacious nature of London's sewers, of course, has been referenced repeatedly above.
• In the Deathstalker series, the city of Golgotha has an enormous sewer system for the Empire's homeworld. The Rebellion has a foothold there, of course.
• Both Lampshaded and subverted in Sandy Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain novel Death or Glory. When Cain is trapped in a building surrounded by Orks, he remarks that having sewers and storm drains as a convenient escape route whenever he's trapped is not nearly as common as he would have liked. Played straight in For the Emperor when Cain and Vail go into the city sewers to hunt Tyranids.
  • And then played somewhat straight in The Emperor's Finest, in which the tunnels under the city are big enough to hold the nearly two meter tall Cain, but not big enough to fit Space Marines.
• The Edge Chronicles has a sewer so large that buildings have been constructed inside it.
• Conan the Rogue has a sewer system under a corrupt town deliberately altered by thieves to act as transport routes, including hidden entrances and marked locations. Even then, only the main trunk lines are large enough to travel.
• One of the The Three Investigators books had the young heroes escape the villains in the storm drain system of a very old city. They meet up with some allies rowing a boat through the drain.
• In War of the Worlds, the Artilleryman intended to build a city hidden in London's sewer system (see Real Life).
• In The Saga of Darren Shan absurdly large sewers feature largely in a number of the books most notably an arena of sorts is built in one part of the sewer and the sewers are used as a base of sorts for the mad vampaneze Murlough.
• In the book Reliquary, the sequel to The Relic, much of the action takes place in massive underground sewers, storm drains, maintenance tunnels, abandoned pneumatic train systems (!) beneath New York City. As noted in the Real Life section below, justified as Truth in Television: New York City is said to stand on seven storeys of underground tunnels, and the authors add a postscript backing the veracity of much of their claims about the extensive tunnelwork below the city.
• In the Tortall Universe book Bloodhound, the climactic battle takes place in the sewage system. Though the tides causing the waters to rise is addressed, so that the final battle is actually in the dirty water.
• An Absurdly Spacious Rubbish Chute serves as the escape path for Jenna and the Heaps in Magyk.
• In The Magician, the second book of The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel series, Machiavelli and Dee take Josh into the spacious sewers and then the catacombs in Paris to be Awakened by Mars Ultor. This is justified because Paris does have an incredibly large sewer system that connects to the catacombs. There is even a special branch of the police force that patrols the sewers.

Live-Action TV

• The pilot episode of Monk.
• Pushing Daisies has the most cheerful and attractive looking sewers I've ever seen. At least one character lives in them.
• There are Cybermen lurking in London's sewers in two Doctor Who stories ("The Invasion" and "Attack of the Cybermen").
  • Daleks and their pig slaves lurked in Manhattan's sewers in the two-parter "Daleks in Manhattan"/"Evolution of the Daleks".
  • New Who also had Cybermen in the "cooling tunnels" beneath Lumic's factory in "Age of Steel", in a Continuity Nod to the previous Cyber-stories.
  • "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" has highly-unconvincing giant rats guarding the sewer entrance to the villain's lair.
• The true size of some sewers can be seen in an episode of Dirty Jobs. The sewer the host explored was so small and cramped that nobody could actually stand up straight, and had to spend all of their time inside bent over.
• If you believe Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, sewers in both Sunnydale and Los Angeles are so big that vampires can travel all over the town during the day.
  • Of course, this is somewhat lampshaded in Sunnydale when we find out that the Mayor built the entire town with demons in mind. The sewer system is made to have easy access to the whole town, and it makes sense that they would be large, so demons could use this to their advantage.
  • Lampshaded on Angel in "Fredless" when Fred states: "I could build a condo in these sewers."
  • After watching the entirety of Buffy and Angel, one wonders how those two don't constantly get remarks about their iffy sewage smell. Angel in particular practically lives down there.
• One episode of Eureka plays with this, though that wasn't so much a sewer as a sewer and the environmental and recycling center of a town of super geniuses.
• On Reaper, Sam, Ben and Sock once had to search the sewers for an escaped soul made of green nuclear-waste goo. The sewers were fairly dank and smelly, but they were easily big enough for three people to walk through.
• The New Avengers: "Gnaws". (Yes, the title is a pun.)
• In the Supernatural episode "Skin", Sam and Dean pursue their quarry into a sewer large enough for them to stand upright, occasionally walk abreast, and a spacious lair for the shapeshifter. Large rusty pipes and large amounts of moisture complete the expected look of an ancient underground despite the episode being set in St. Louis, MO.
  • Averted in the later episode "No Exit" in which the sewers are extremely small and dark with the Winchesters barely able to make it through
• An episode of Popular Mechanics for Kids is devoted to this, when they go into a sewer to look for a ping-pong ball. Being a show about science and facts, they remark that you always need the proper equipment and that it can be dangerous to go into a sewer. It was actually pretty spacious in there; almost hallway like, IIRC.
• In Beauty and The Beast, a secret society exists deep underneath New York, in relatively fancy trappings.
• Played pretty straight in the various CSI series.
• Dark Angel Like every. damn. episode.
• Due South episode "Manhunt", the Chicago sewers are not only large enough for three grown men and a wolf, they are large enough for three grown men and a wolf to paddle a canoe through.
• Used and averted in X-Files season 2, episode 2 "The Host." Mulder visits an absurdly spacious sewer in Newark, N.J., and later remarks about its size to a Newark sanitation engineer, who confirms that section as being part of the older system, while the newer parts are not more than 24 inches in diameter.
• Played straight with size, but averted with toxicity in an episode of Casualty. It involves two guys who want to win a bet which involved walking to the pub by using the sewers as a shortcut. The guys have oxygen supply, but then they start to run out... That's when the paramedics are called.
• The G-Cans System (see Real Life) pops up on occasion in Toku programs. A recent stand-out example is in Kamen Rider Decade, where Decade has a high-speed battle with Kamen Rider TheBee.
• The Legend of Dick and Dom has a sewer under the Big Bad's castle large enough for the good guys to escape through. They do come out the other side covered in, well, what you would expect. Oddly, this has the opposite of Nobody Poops; there are very few people in the castle, but lots of sewage in the sewer.

Tabletop Games

• Paranoia once had an section simply named "Sewerworld!" in the Send in the Clones adventure. The author observes something to the effect that sewers are remarkably consistent over time. "You could put a Roman sewer-slave in modern Tokyo's ultra-sanitary system... sure it'd be cruel. But he wouldn't wonder where he was..."
• Any sewer in Dungeons & Dragons is spacious and comes complete with whole thieves guilds, secret wizard labs, and lots and lots of specially adapted monsters (like the Otyugh and the Cesspit Ooze).
  • Module I9 Day of Al' Akbar: The sewer under the city of Khaibar.
  • Supplement Adventure Pack I, adventure "The House of Long Knives". The sewers are 20 feet wide and 15 feet high.
  • Module A1 Slave Pits of the Undercity. The sewers under the city of Highport are 20 feet wide and 10 feet high.
  • Module FR1 Waterdeep and the North. The sewers of Waterdeep can be as large as 20 feet across and high enough for humans to walk through them.
• Warhammer Fantasy Battle is even worse: there are skaven, mutants, and chaos cults. The only solace is that all the shit is on surface.
  • Played incredibly straight in the first Gotrek and Felix omnibus, where the eponymous pair become sewerjacks (basically patrolmen, but for the sewers.) That's right, the sewers are so massive they require law enforcement. It's specifically noted that the sewers under the city of Nuln were made by master Dwarf artisans, and the system includes cathedral ceilings in some of the central tunnels.
• Not surprising since they're based on the ones in Paris, but in 7th Sea, the sewer system in the city of Charouse in Montaigne is quite spacious and filled with surprises, including possibly a Stargate.
  • The Paris underground is complicated by the presence of a network of catacombs under the city.
• In Shadowrun, the sewers under Denver happen to not only be rather spacious, but also open up to a maze of former subway tunnels and other cloaca, sites which attract communities of ghouls, rogue spirits, coyotes, and the occasional aspiring thaumaturgist.
  • This is actually rather common in Sixth World sprawls. Seattle features the Ork Underground, built on the old Seattle Catacombs, the bus tunnels, old basements, and of course, lots and lots of sewer tunnels. Justified in the new Manhattan setting, where the city built right over the remains of an earthquake and just sealed off the old subway system in favor of suspended monorails.
• In SLA Industries, the planet of Mort boasts a generously spacious sewer system, one vast enough to hide hordes of serial killer gangs and other monsters.
• In Warhammer 40,000, the lowest levels of Hive Cities resemble this trope, and the lower decks of starships are about a fifty-fifty mix of Absurdly Spacious Sewer and Eternal Engine.
  • Justified in case of Hive Cities since it's stated many times that these mega-cities grow by new generations building on the ruins of the old ones. So those deep levels are actually remains of streets and buildings that have become enclosed on all sides, and therefore seem like tunnel systems.
    • Correction: According to Necromunda, it's the next-to-last levels of the Underhive that are like that. The very lowest level, a.k.a. "The Sump", is a literal sea of various human and chemical wastes, patrolled by diamond-eyed spiders the size of battle tanks.
• Vampire: The Masquerade has sewers spacious enough so clans of vampires can live in them, along with libraries. So not only are they spacious, but dry.
  • Given that said vampires have covertly directed human affairs for thousands of years, one might think this trope justified there since one of the vampire clans prefers living in them.
  • This did not significantly change in the New World of Darkness; they turn up occasionally in Hunter: The Vigil.
• As touched on a couple of times above, this trope can occasionally be justified in fantasy games by making the sewer system a series of sunken streets.
• Chaosium's Thieves' World boxed set said that Sanctuary's sewers were large enough for armed troops to pass through them.
• In Magic the Gathering, the sewers of the city-world of Ravnica are so spacious that they count as cities unto themselves; justified in that they are old cities that have been built over. They're mostly used by the Golgari elves and humans to dispose of waste and grow produce for the surface-dwellers, and by Dimir and Rakdos criminals as safe havens, though they also have their fair job of wandering monsters. The place is even referred to as The Undercity.
  • In the later expansion Shards of Alara, the plane of Esper has a sewer system known as the Tidehollow, where the plane's more unsavory elements salvage Etherium scrap. Predictably, most of the shard's black mana comes from this region.

Theater

• In Guys and Dolls, the New York sewers have enough room for a full dance number!
• The sewers in Urinetown are large enough to hold the rebel "base". And one song with a full dance section.
  • As Urinetown is essentially a Troperiffic pastiche of musical theater, this is hardly surprising.
• We never actually see the sewers per se in Les Misérables, as they're in most productions just represented by shafts of light that Valjean walks through, but everything is covered in Literature and Real Life.

Video Games

• A lot of videogames have this kind of level. For a more comprehensive list, look here.
• Air Force Delta Strike had you flying through Absurdly Spacious Subway tunnels.
• Armored Core is a fairly egregious example: the sewers aren't just human sized, they are in fact mech sized. Combine this with the fact that the mechs in Armored Core are shown to be at least two stories tall, and that these sewers are spacious in relation to the ACs themselves, and these are some very spacious sewers.
• Assassin's Creed: Altair's Chronicles features repeated trips through sewers with moving platforms and water that gushes out of pipes at repeated intervals for no apparent reason.
• In true Batman fashion, Batman: Arkham Asylum reveals a massive complex of catacombs and sewer lines hidden in the deep caves of Arkham Island, one such system housing Killer Croc.
  • Sure explains why Arkham is such a Cardboard Prison.
• Betrayal at Krondor, where the sewers under Krondor were so large that they had 2 whole floors, and several different gangs all living and operating out of them.
• In Beyond Oasis, the sewer-like area underneath the Castle. This is explained as being the storage place for an ancient power, which Silver Armlet sends you down to get.
• Many levels in the SNES and Mega Drive platform game Boogerman: A Pick and Flick Adventure.
  • Or at least the bonus areas, which are accessed by flushing yourself down a toilet.
• The tutorial level of zOMG features this with a lampshade hanging in the in-game manual.
• The Sewers of Draj.
• Chrono Trigger: The Sewer Access in 2300 A.D., which you must fight and navigate through in order to reach Keeper's Dome.
• City of Heroes: Paragon City has a huge sewer system choked with all kinds of villains (mutated cultist gangs, decidedly amoral surgeons and their scientifically animated zombies, just for starters...), and an abandoned network that's home to even more dangerous villains (extradimensional alien invaders, giant mutated monsters). Even generic missions have an instanced sewer map for this trope.
  • The Rogue Isles, in City of Villains, have their fair share as well.
  • Averted in the Praetorian Underground from the Going Rogue expansion—this insanely spacious tunnel system (complete with faction bases and offering an alternate way of getting from zone to zone fast) is not a sewer, but an abandoned subway network.
• Along with vents and maintenance tunnels, a common way to safely get from point A to B in Deus Ex. One sewer junction has an entire bioweapons laboratory built into it.
  • The prequel, Human Revolution, continues this trend, to the point where hobos, street gangs and conspirators, make routine use of the sewers of Detroit and Hengsha.
• Freeware RPG Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden has one as the location of a community of furries.
• One of levels in a Flash game, Dangerous Dungeons, is called explicitly "Absurdly Spacious Sewer".
• The very first dungeon in Dark Chronicle is the sewers of the hero's hometown. While it is an easy level to blow through in less than an hour, it's notorious for being THE most frustrating area in the game to play the golfing minigame Spheda, due to the small gutters along the walls that like to trap your "ball".
• Though perhaps cramped by video game standards, Diablo 2 has several underground areas that are far roomier than might be reasonably expected. Act 2 under the town and Act 3 beneath the jungle cities are two prominent sewer examples. And although not technically a sewer, the chapel basement of the original Diablo is absurdly larger than the building itself. . . even discounting the encroaching levels of Hell.
• Distorted Travesty dares to place its giant sewer... Inside a train!
• EarthBound and Mother 3. The EarthBound one notably averts the "not walking through sewage thing" (and for some reason, even has little ladders leading into the muck. Eww.)
• In The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, the sewers of Vivec are ridiculously spacious, often far higher than needed, with walkways on the sides and a deep waterway in the middle. Given that the water is clean, and also that the city is built in the middle of a lake, they're likely storm drains more than anything. They also house cultists, conspirators, and (with the right mods) secret dungeons!
  • In the expansion for Morrowind "Tribunal" the sewer is even more spacious.
    • Justified because they "sewers" are actually the ruins of the original city retooled as a sewer/dungeon
  • Justified in the sequel Oblivion. The Imperial City has insanely massive sewers, but it is explained in the in-game literature that the whole infrastructure is an abandoned Ayleid city, so the sewers apparently have just lost their former purpose.
• While Eternal Sonata is notable for having a sewer in which there is thriving plant-life.
  • The plant life actually made sense in context since the sewers were also absurdly well-lit for no apparent reason.
• Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII both have sewers that the characters move through and battle within, under Sector 7, Midgar and under Deling City, respectively.
  • Deling City's sewer is notable here, however. Since you can get lost in it.
• Final Fantasy XII's Garamsythe Waterway is a labyrinthine series of tunnels that are at least thirty-feet tall and much wider. Some rooms are large enough to fit basketball courts, and these naturally, are the sites of boss battles. This is, however, heavily implied to be an actual waterway, designed for the purpose of bringing water into the desert city of Rabanastre.
• Radiata Stories has Jack, the player character, traverse the sewers underneath his guild in a couple of missions. The missions are notoriously disliked due to the sewers also doubling as The Maze. Like EarthBound, the game averts the whole "not actually stepping in sewage" deal, to Jack's horror.

Jack: Gross, it's in my shoes!

• Eye of the Beholder takes place, technically, in the sewers of Waterdeep. Though after the first levels, the sewer-ish feel is replaced by dwarven tunnels, drow mazes, thri-kreen hives and an underground palace.
• Sewer areas in Glider PRO are just as tall as other kinds of rooms.
• Subverted in Half-Life 2. Despite taking place Twenty Minutes Into the Future, much of the sewer system is horribly cramped and dangerous and extremely difficult to maneuver through.
• Hell Gate: London.
• Jet Set Radio Future features a positively palatial sewer system including vertical shafts several stories tall. (The player's choice of Rudie can, of course, skate right on up using his/her rocket-propelled inline skates.)
• Knights of the Old Republic has one of these when you're searching for Zaalbar, the resident wookie. It's large enough to hide a Rancor in!
• In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Snake escapes Groznyj Grad the first time, after being captured, by tricking the guard into opening his cell, sneaking to a manhole in the base, and running through a sewer leading to an Inevitable Waterfall where he is confronted by Ocelot and the Ocelot Unit.
• The Last Remnant has at least one example of this in the Nagapur Aqueducts, it is so spacious that Giants live down there.
• Might and Magic VI has the Free Haven Sewers, VII has the Erathian Sewers. Both need to be explored for plot advancement and/or character promotion.
• The Marketplace in Monsters, Inc.: Scream Team.
• Postal 2 has a hidden one. It leads to a hidden Taliban base containing nukes.
• Shadows of the Empire has a level where you have to infiltrate the Big Bad's palace through the sewers. There are some sections that are easily bigger than a football field.
• In Resident Evil 4, Leon falls through a trap door to a massive sewer system beneath Salazar's castle, complete with giant Plaga-cockroaches. Salazar compounds matters by sending his right hand to dispose of the protagonist.
  • Resident Evil \2 also had some absurdly spacious sewers, with features such as an elevating bridge and offices for sewer workers.
• La Tale is notable for having a sewer that is several stories high.
  • And infested with Goddamned Bats.
• The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess features one of these twice in the game: the same location appears as the training level for Link's wolf form, as well as later, after the third dungeon. While not a huge area, it's still absurdly spacious, and seems to double as a prison of some kind. It's also worth noting that said area is apparently inside Hyrule Castle, and clearly above ground level.
  • And in A Link to The Past, Zelda escapes from Hyrule castle trough the sewers.
  • The Bottom of the Well in Ocarina of Time also has elements of this, although it's mostly Big Boo's Haunt.
• In Lego Batman the Gotham sewers aren't just big enough to walk through; they're so big that you need a flight suit or a high jump just to reach certain parts of it. However, this network is not very well secured. Penguin and Killer Croc use the sewer system to break out Catwoman by coming up through the toilets in the police station. And yes, there are alligators.
• Both Parasite Eve games with New York City sewers and a sewage passageway between the shelter and the motel.
• In Portal, Chell travels through what appears to be an open-topped sewer... barefoot.
• Professor Layton and the Curious Village
• In Mirror's Edge, multiple high-rise buildings can be stuffed into the city's storm drains.
  • These are based on the real Tokyo Underground Drainage System.
• The video game of Robots has a mazelike sewer that is inexplicably set up like a huge pinball machine. You actually have to use a transport pod to traverse this level.
• Romancing SaGa had two: Estamir and Melvir. The sewers of Estamir were catacombs that could connect North and South Estamir; had a graveyard, and a temple dedicated to a Stronger Sibling of the Big Bad. The Sewers of Melvir was a labyrinth that could allow one to enter the palace and had a temple dedicated to the Big Bad himself.
• SaGa 2 has one in Venus' world. With MAGI and perfectly usable items, no less!
• Serious Sam -- The First Encounter and Serious Sam 2 have sewer levels. Lampshade Hanging in Serious Sam II when Sam says "I knew it! There ain't no games without sewer levels."
• In Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne, the Great Underpass of Ginza.
  • In Persona 2: Eternal Punishment, the.....uhm, Sewer.
• Sonic Adventure has Casinopolis' sewer, Dilapidated Way, which your ball gets dumped into if you lose a game of pinball. Sonic is the ball. Oddly, it's full of hazardous traps, money, shields and other things. However, subverted with Station Square's sewer, which is incredibly small and exists only to get Sonic and Big into the downtown city and Twinkle Park, respectively.
• Sorcerer University of The Spellcasting Series has a large and complex sewer system beneath it, which Ernie must use for rapid and/or secretive transit. The tunnels are large enough for an elevephant to walk through without issue. Unlike a lot of video game examples of this trope, though, Ernie doesn't get the luxury of walking on nice clean ledges and pipes. The smell in some areas is said to be more than Ernie can bear, and occasionally, even more than a bear could bear.
• Suikoden II has a traversable sewer area under Two River City, where a recruitable (and less-than-hygienic) character lives.
• In Summoner, the sewers of Lenele are huge. Even great big Golems have plenty of room.
• Super Mario Bros. frequently uses this for the famous underground levels. You could argue that the entire Mushroom Kingdom is a giant sewer system from the abundance of green plumbing pipes. In fact, the Ur Example for video games is the original Mario Bros., which is where the Mario Bros. themselves actually made use of their plumbing abilities.
  • Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga feature one each below Toad Town and Beanbean Castle.
• In Tales of Symphonia, Zelos takes everyone through the Meltokio sewer, which is spacious enough to allow giant rats to roam it freely, and has multiple levels, computers, and trash compactors.
  • And despite the trash compactors implying the area is normally used by workers, it can't be travelled without using a magic honey-we-shrunk-ourselves ring, walking on spider webs and patching up gaps in the walkways with blocks of garbage.
  • I'm assuming those workers have keys or codes that would allow them to open those locked doors.
• Team Fortress 2—Anywhere there are sewers / underwater pipes, they're big enough for even the Heavy Weapons Guy to run and/or swim through without trouble. 2Fort is the most well known example, but other Absurdly Spacious Sewers can be seen in Doublecross, Hydro, Well, and a number of custom maps.
• Toki Tori has Slime Sewers. The levels are covered in bright green waste and crawling with slugs.
• Lots and lots of examples in the Wario Land series. The level Arabian Nights in Wario Land 4 for example has sewers big enough to fly a flying carpet through, and have various secrets hidden near the ceiling and under the water. Crescent Moon Village apparently has two separate sewer systems, both of which are much larger than you'd expect from the design of such a level. The Golden Passage in said game also has some kind of underground canal running all the way from the start of the level to the end, as some kind of place Wario lands in when he misses a jump.
• In World of Warcraft, the city of Dalaran has a sewer area with spacious tunnels and halls that are big enough to contain several buildings and a small lake. There's even an inn down there! Other than said lake there's not much running water, and no waste other that some junk lying around in piles of rubble.
  • The Undercity is built out of the sewers and catacombs of the city of Lordaeron.
    • Both are justified: Undercity was in the process of being converted into Arthas' new throne when he had to leave and Dalaran's sewers intersected with their prison complex.
• Lost Souls MUD has a couple of these, in the major cities of Losthaven and Liathyr.
• The infamous sewer in Xenogears, where you can lose yourself eternally and forever and be assaulted by a giant mutated skeleton.
• It seems like the entire of Clanker's Cavern in Banjo-Kazooie is a massive, massive, massive sewer. To put it in perspective, the central room contains the level's eponymous whale-sized robot shark. Clanker's Cavern itself is accessed through one of the many similarly large sewers of Gruntilda's Lair (though they're comparatively small).
• The sewers under St Petersburg in Hitman 2.
• Skies of Arcadia features such a sewer under the capital city of Valua that the protagonists must go through in order to rescue their friends in the middle of a public execution. Partly justified in that it used to be catacombs. However, it's never explained why a city floating above a limitless abyss would need sewers in the first place instead of, you know, piping all their waste straight into said abyss.
• No One Lives Forever not only has this, but it even contains a sign reading "Obligatory FPS Sewer Section".
• As befitting its tabletop source material, the sewers in Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines are very roomy and connect to almost everywhere - luckily for those Nosferatu players who need to move around without being seeing by mortals.
• Ratchet and Clank Up Your Arsenal has a large sewer on Aquatos big enough for Ratchet, Clank, and Skid to break in, a multi-layered area hiding nintey-nine sewer crystals at twenty thousand bolts apart, and a humorously named weapons dealer of questionable credentials.
• Comix Zone's sewers have enough room for our hero, Sketch Turner, to suspend himself from pipes to avoid low attacks.
• The last section in Police Quest II. Which is sort of odd, considering that the games' main selling point is being so scrupulously realistic.
• The end-game stage in The World Ends With You is a perfect representation of this trope, not to mention Truth in Television: that sewer really does exist in Shibuya.
• In EverQuest 2 the sewers of Qeynos have vaulted ceilings so high and well lit that it practically looks like you're in a cathedral.
• BloodRayne 2 has sewers big enough to do acrobatics in.
• The future city of New Mombasa depicted in Halo 3: ODST doesn't just have your average sewage system. It is also home to an extensive maintenance system that runs ten floors deep, an underground lake, dozens of Bottomless Pits, and a supermarket-sized AI construct.
• Fable III has sewers that are comfy and dry. In fact, they're so clean your dog can sniff out a wedding ring somebody dropped down there!
• In Famous sometimes has your character traveling down huge sewers to learn new powers, and bring electricity back to the city.
• The sewers Drake and Flynn use to enter the museum at the beginning of Uncharted 2.
• In one stage in Nanostray 2 you are flying a spaceship trouth a sewer system and when you look at the background one can see how ridiculously huge the sewers are.
• Pokémon Ranger: Fall City's sewer system. It's big enough to have a few Pokémon living inside it.
• Parts of the Depths in Dark Souls are like this, filled with rats, slime monsters, and Hollows.
• There is one of these in the second Black Mirror game.
• The Trail of Anguish's sewer is so big you can build and fly a hovercraft through it.
• Yoshi's Story features two levels set inside giant sewer pipes. The first level, Jelly Pipe, is loaded up with mysterious gunk that clings to the sides. The second, Torrential Maze, is full of rushing water to sweep you away.
• When the heroes from Shining the Holy Ark get kidnapped they use a secret passage and escape into the sewers. It appear to be one massive space under a vaulted ceiling, with multiple levels, that is actually bigger than the castle above it. Maybe justified as there were more than one secret entrance to the castle and it's implied that soon of the royalty is entombed there...in the sewers.
• Global Agenda gets in on the action with a mission in the subterranean waterways in North Sonara (Recursive Colony Update). It's the sort of spacious that some of the shorter-range turrets can't cover its width.
• There's a huge sewer underneath the village in Stardew Valley, which is home to the merchant, Krobus, as well as a fishing spot.

Web Comics

• Subverted in Antihero for Hire, where Shadehawk escapes capture through the Underground Non-Sewer Pathway System.
• In the Narbonic Director's Commentary, Shaennon Garrity openly admits that the design of Helen's sewer-based underground lab comes entirely from the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon.
• In Girl Genius, the sewers of Sturmhalten are not only large enough to walk around in, they're large enough to support a deeply alarming ecosystem.
  • It's worth keeping in mind, though, that Sturmhalten is home to at least two Sparks, with it being implied that they're just the most recent crop. Once this is realized, the ecosystem—not to mention the sewer system itself—starts to make sense. And besides that, the latest ruler of Sturmhalten had an alliance of convenience with the Geisterdamen -- he was hiding them in a level under the main sewers. If there wasn't enough room for them to trek through and haul their Lady's equipment around with them, he would've redesigned things so that there would be. Although the comments from the two guides rather implies that the sewers have always been that way. Also, Sturmhalten is an old European town, and nothing in the series to date suggests that any of the European towns have modernized their sewer systems, although considering that said modernization would probably come at the hands of a Spark...
  • That's not unique. But deys not all as extensive as under Mechanicsburg. Or else Europa would collapse after a hard rain.
• The sewers beneath Brassmoon City in Goblins have sculptures....
  • The sewer outlets are absurdly small compared the size of the tunnels inside, but the goblins do in fact complain about the smell and pass on eating the foodstuffs that were in their bags when they trudged through the sewage.
• In Sluggy Freelance this is how Torg and his resistance movement get around during the "That Which Redeems" arc. The sewage even smells like flowers, and the various gross things living down there are all very friendly and polite. The Dimension of Lame is just that sort of place.
• The Order of the Stick mocks this trope: Azure City not only has such sewers, but there are three tunnels clearly labeled "Ocean", "Anachronistic Sewage Plant", and "Obligatory Sewer-Themed Labyrinth".
• Aversion: The Council team must navigate a proper storm drain that nominally catches rainwater from a nullah in the first story arc of Elf Blood.
• The sewers of Rio in Vinigortonio are large enough to sail a boat down. Lampshaded by the characters:

Jose Carlos: I had no idea sewers were so large!! Vinicius: You'd be surprised at how much they hide from us.

Web Original

• Spoony has expressed a hatred of sewer levels in videogames. He was especially disgusted by the game that's all sewer levels.
• A sanitary sewer like this appears on the island used for version two of Survival of the Fittest, spanning the entire island underground, but from the vague descriptions it's implied that people can only just barely move across the walkways on the sides, and that otherwise it's fairly cramped.
• The sewers of The Town are also infamously large, spacious and full of random monsters including rat shaped robots and Xenomorphs.
• In the story "Boston Brawl" in the Whateley Universe, the Boston sewers are big enough to get lost in. Phase gets stuck in the pitch dark, knee-deep in.. ugh, don't even think about it. Then she gets attacked by hundreds of The Necromancer's zombies. In the pitch dark. Ick.
  • And don't forget that in "Merry Meet, Merry Part, and Merry Meet Again", Merry spends a lot of time in the city sewer to try and keep out of sight - and then ends up going deep enough that she finds a man-made cavern with a very powerful computer hidden inside. The reasons for this, and what else is hidden in the cavern may qualify for a partial A.I. Is a Crapshoot. Or possibly a subversion thereof, since Palm was deliberately going for humanity-unfriendly AI.
• These have appeared in several Global Guardians stories, but they are always storm drains and flood-control tunnels, old abandoned subway lines, and other tunnels people were meant to access rather than sanitary lines. The most notable case was when Team America discovered the Twelve Tribes living in the catacombs under New York.
• Partially subverted in Catacombs of New York. The sewers there are approximately the size that the real sewers of New York are, until you get to the buried underground Indian settlement.
• "Archons March On" RPG blog has Suspiciously Spacious Sewers random generator (for 6^6=46,656 combinations). The first roll is:

(d6) This sewer’s so damn big because… it was expanded by an invading army in a sapping operation. the city above is a hub for chthonian mystery cults who use the underground for their rites and temples. its builders incorporated the existing cave network below the city. it's built through the ruins of a previous city which was ruined and sunk beneath the earth. it was constructed by a team of golems who never received the order to stop constructing it. it was originally intended to be a supersized alchemical apparatus to extract the fundamentum profundus.

Western Animation

• Futurama really played with this one in a few episodes. New New York's sewers are actually the city of New York, and home to a community of mutants, who mention off-hand that they have a sub-sewer system (home to a community of sub-mutants, according to sub-urban legend). It helps that New New York's sewers connect with the subterranean ruins of old New York. Reality intrudes, however, when the Planet Express crew gets lost down there and Fry says that the only way out is through... a tube that's at most only a few inches wide ("Don't worry, it gets wider after about a mile").
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In all incarnations, their sewer lair is larger than any house you've been in (possibly) and the tunnels are wide enough to accommodate vehicles like the tank-sized Battle Shell. It is very seldom that the Turtles must come into contact with anything you've flushed. In the 1990s cartoon, their original lair was invaded and they later got another, even more palatial one.
  • Kind of justified; Their second lair was actually an ancient, abandoned Elyntian outpost. They later moved out of the sewers and into a warehouse.
• Mainframe in ReBoot was shown to have sewers in one episode. Why digital lifeforms require them is a mystery.
  • They're for when someone calls flush();
• In Sonic Underground, the only way to get very deep into Dr. Robotnik's empire was in... the sewers.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender: When the gang needs a way to sneak into the newly-occupied Omashu, Aang shows them a secret way through the sewers, which is large enough to hold nearly the entire population of the city. More realistic than most, given it's full of sticky smelly goop that Aang and Katara are able to bend away from them, but that Sokka gets covered in - and gets a little too closely acquainted with some of its denizens as a result.
• Kim Possible has done the sewer gig more than once, even twenty years into a dystopian future. In their defense, they actually had to walk through some of the sewer fluid.
• Freakazoid!! used this until it became a running gag, with more than one character complaining about "poo gas".
  • Roddy McStew notes they're called "crud vapors" in his native Scotland.
• Several villains in Batman: The Animated Series based themselves in the sewers, requiring Batman to go there in search of them, most notably the Sewer King and his legion of children, and Killer Croc and Baby Dahl.
• Likewise, Batman Beyond ventured into a downright cavernous sewer system in at least one episode.
• In The Tick, Sewer Urchin lives in an enormous apartment in The City's sewers, and on some occasions provides the other heroes with goods that are otherwise difficult or impossible to acquire, claiming "You'd be surprised what people throw away, yeah, definitely."
• In The Spectacular Spider-Man, Flint Marko and Alex O'Hirn flee the scene of a robbery by busting through the store's basement wall, and escaping into marvelously cavernous sewers, only to be promptly caught by Spider-Man. Later, Spider-Man traps the Rhino in a steam-tunnel created from ruptured sewer pipes. Quarters are tighter, but the hulking Rhino can still maneuver relatively freely. Half the Sinister Six pursue a fleeing Spidey through these sewers as well.
• Justified Trope for Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego??, as Carmen Sandiego leaves a clue for Zack and Ivy in the Sewer of Paris.
• In an episode of Hey Arnold!, Arnold drops his grandfather's watch down a hole to the sewer (which somehow didn't break even though it fell for three seconds before hitting the ground: a 140 foot drop). He descends into the sewer to retrieve it only to find it has been taken by the "Sewer King," a man who lives in the sewer and claims sovereignty over it.
• Stock Animation in Code Lyoko often has the heroes skateboarding through some very spacious sewers. Then again, the series is French...
  • Since the water is flowing directly into the river, it is more of a storm drain tunnel than a sewer.
• In Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy, the sewers beneath the cul-de-sac, as seen briefly in "High-Heeled Ed" and more extensively in "Boom Boom Out Goes the Ed", are pretty spacious.
• The Family Guy episode "Breaking Out is Hard to Do" ends in a sewer that is wide enough to fit two TIE fighters.
  • Notably averted in the The Shawshank Redemption parody, where Peter barely squeezes through a half mile of dirty sewage escaping.
• Danny Phantom had one episode where the sewer system was big enough to support one ghost boy, his currently possessed love interest, and thousands and thousands of big ass vines gunning towards him. Has some incredibly clean water, too.
• Anakin and Obi-Wan wade through one of these in Star Wars: Clone Wars as part of a Dungeon Bypass.
• The sewers in the Batman: Gotham Knight are just effin' enormous, one area seems to be several stories tall.
• The small town of South Park even has spacious sewers big enough for the boys (and Mr. Garrison) to walk in when searching for Mr. Hankey in "Chef's Chocolate Salty Balls." Obviously, the presence of a magical talking piece of crap means the "no poop" rule is averted.
  • Even ignoring Mr. Hankey, the show is one of very few works to acknowledge the disgusting nature of sewers in general. In one gag, Cartman sneezes on Kyle, who complains that sneezing on others is gross and unsanitary. Cartman responds, "oh, sorry, you wouldn't want to get exposed to germs while you're knee-deep in human feces."
• Jimmy Two-Shoes: The sewers of Miseryville are apparently big enough to house a secret lab for the resident Mad Scientist.
• Hellboy: Blood and Iron: Starts with Hellboy fighting a giant mystic bull robot in a sewer system rivaling a cathedral in size.
  • It's like a maze down here. A maze of crap.
• Arlen sewers in King of the Hill episode "Serpunt" is big enough to walk on when Dale and Hank hunt down the escaped snake.
• The Simpsons episode "Two Bad Neighbors" has walkable sewers running perpendicular to the street when Bart and Homer attempt to sneak into Bush's house.
• Total Drama World Tour has one of these in the episode "Broadway Baby". The cast rides speed boats through it.
• This seems to be the deal with the sewers of Mellowbrook on Kick Buttowski as Kick manages to operate them quite well, even with Kendall riding with him on his skateboard. They also appear to host crocodiles or aligators.
• Phineas and Ferb have this when Candace is required to battle a sewer-dwelling aligator/crocodile to get one of her Fire Side badges.

Real Life

• Truth in Television for almost any city of significant size, although what most people would consider "sewers" are actually storm drains that are for carrying excess rainwater away from the city to prevent the streets from flooding.
• London's sewers are in places as spacious as computer games would suggest, having been built on a massive scale in the 19th century to accommodate future population growth (though the network has grown a hundredfold since then). The Victorian-era section of the London sewer system is huge, with several million tons of brickwork and tunnels up to nine feet in diameter. There are also many kilometers of unused underground tunnels built for other purposes, ranging from railways to military bunkers.
  • The Artilleryman was right!
  • The Thames Tideway Scheme, an upgrade to London's sewers first proposed in 2011 and started in 2016, involves adding a section the size of the Channel Tunnel.
• ... and Moscow sewers.
• The sewers of Vienna: Most of the sewer system has sidewalks, there are even big storage rooms down there. The film The Third Man was partly shot underground.
• Parts of Japan have been integrated into the G-Cans project -- a stormwater system so huge it can be favorably compared to the Mines of Moria.
• The Sewers of Paris—literally famed in song and story—are a major tourist attraction.
• Beneath Saint Paul, Minnesota there is a extensive network of several tunnel systems, including both active and abandoned sewers. These sewers also interconnect with several natural and abandoned man-made caves.
• Some old cities have large underground cisterns, design to collect and hold rainwater, which reach the sizes of some of these fictional sewers. For example, the Basilica Cistern in Istanbul.
• Truth in Television: There are whole communities living underground in New York City and Paris, to name a few, and obviously, there's more than enough elbow room. In Paris, there are even illegal theaters and passageways to the catacombs via sewers.
• Many of the much older major cities, especially the ones in Europe, have vast underground networks of tunnels and rooms that are leftovers from the city's previous development age. For example, Rome is built over many ancient buildings, Berlin has numerous World War II era bunkers, and Chicago has a labyrinth of secret rooms and passages built during Prohibition.
  • The parking lot in front of Baltimore's City Hall has the old Jones' Falls River Bridge buried under it. When the river was moved to build Downtown, whoever was in-charge decided to bury the bridge instead of tear it down. This has the unfortunate side effect that as much as the city would like to sell the land for another skyscraper, they can't because the bridge protects much of the main sewer, water, and electrical lines running through the area (making it too expensive/inconvenient to remove) and with the bridge there it destabilizes the ground and any potential foundations laid there.
• Not technically a sewer, but Toronto's path is made up of numerous underground tunnels and walkways, often housing retail stores, connecting many of the major office buildings downtown and linked to the subway system.
  • Even moreso with Montreal, which has a 32 km of tunnels/underground complex doubling as one massive shopping mall spanning most of downtown (The so-called "Ville Souterraine", or "Underground City" to Anglophones, is the largest underground complex in the world). Built because the extremely harsh winters tend to drive pedestrian indoors.
  • Rochester, MN also has an underground walkway network that serves a large part of the city. I believe this type of infrastructure is common in cold cities.
    • Further, there are sections of both Toronto and Montreal's sewers that you can walk comfortably in standing upright. People have done it (and gotten arrested), but it is definitely large enough to fit a man standing upright.
  • Osaka, Japan has a network of pathways which connect several of the subway stations. The subway stations in Tokyo could count in their own right: several are huge sprawling complexes where multiple subway lines cross.
• Seattle had a major fire in 1898, and to make sewage flow out into the sea (at high tide, it had a habit of... going the other way from outhouses) they simply rebuilt everything on top of the old foundations. That means today there is a sort of small town buried beneath downtown's streets. Highly unsafe in most of it though.
• In Cologne there is a huge hall with two candelabra in it. It was build for a visit from Kaiser Wilhelm II [1]
• In the Warsaw Uprising the quoters separated by Nazi forces tried to communicate with each other using the sewer system. Of course it could be described as anything but spacious and clean. In one case a whole quoter (both soldiers and civilians) was evacuated by these means.
  • Fun fact: The Warsaw Uprising Museum has a full-size, accessible replica of a Warsaw sewer.
• The street level of Atlanta is today one story above where it was a century ago, due to a system of viaducts built to raise it out of the way of the railroad lines. When the lower level was "rediscovered" in the 1960s, it was turned into a shopping and entertainment mall. (What else?)
• Not technically a sewer, but Las Vegas has a 515-mile underground flood channel system that homeless people actually live in.
• Texas A&M University has the "Steam Tunnels", a system of underground utility tunnels under the main campus originally built to pump steam from a central plant to the various buildings' basements to heat them during the winter months. Now it is used to run water and sewage pipes, electrical and phone lines, and even network lines. Campus lore says that there used to be a few student "lounges" set up in intersections of the tunnels where there was a bit more space, but nowadays the access grates to the tunnels are padlocked, and exploration of the area is discouraged by the university officials.
  • The University of BC in Vancouver has a similar system, but they're still easily accessible if one knows how. However, nobody goes into them but repairmen and engineering students mucking around.
• Chicago has the Deep Tunnel project, which is a pretty massive-scale water handling project that includes storm flow as well as sewage. Some of the tunnels are easily wide enough to walk through, and it's even possible to get to some of those areas via manhole.
• While not a sewer, and certainly not as extensive as the other examples on this page, Quebec city's Laval University has built a tunnel system under its campus to link every buildings. A student could theoretically pass the whole year without ever needing to go outside, as almost every kind of services and store are available in at least one of the university's building.
  • Lakehead University in Thunder Bay has a similar system of tunnels (both public access and service) for the same reason; it gets really cold in the winter. Sadly, the university has outgrown the public tunnels and only the main buildings are connected, making for a chilly walk to some classes or back to the campus residences.
• Infamous British fugitive Raoul Moat evaded capture by the police in Northumberland for eight days in 2010, apparently by hiding in Rothbury's network of storm drains, popping out of manhole covers occasionally to steal vegetables from allotments, and for a stroll in the High Street.
• St. Louis, MO has a fairly large underground made up of sewer systems, old railway tunnels, various tunnels for other purposes, and lots and lots of caves (that have been mostly sealed off). Very few people (if any) in the city know exactly how extensive they all are and it is very illegal to go down into them, and for good reason. The sewers, tunnels, and caves are so full of toxic gas build up that going down into them without a copious amount of protective equipment is practically suicide, and that's assuming a collapse doesn't kill you (since the older ones aren't exactly easy to maintain).