A short Dunsany episode, but one of my favourite stories from him. Thanks to Thomas Copeland for reading this into the public domain through Librivox.
Taking up Picadilly
Going down Picadilly one day and nearing Grosvenor Place I saw, if my memory is not at fault, some workmen with their coats off—or so they seemed. They had pickaxes in their hands and wore corduroy trousers and that little leather band below the knee that goes by the astonishing name of “York-to-London.”
They seemed to be working with peculiar vehemence, so that I stopped and asked one what they were doing.
“We are taking up Picadilly,” he said to me.
“But at this time of year?” I said. “Is it usual in June?”
“We are not what we seem,” said he.
“Oh, I see,” I said, “you are doing it for a joke.”
“Well, not exactly that,” he answered me.
“For a bet?” I said.
“Not precisely,” said he.
And then I looked at the bit that they had already picked, and though it was broad daylight over my head it was darkness down there, all full of the southern stars.
“It was noisy and bad and we grew aweary of it,” said he that wore corduroy trousers. “We are not what we appear.”
They were taking up Picadilly altogether.
Commentary
Let us look at this incident through the Four Realms model.
Are these creatures angels? If so humans have created Piccadilly, and by doing so they have transgressed against God to an unusual degree. The angels have come down to make it right. Their method of making it right seems to have pierced a hole through to the other side of the Earth which gives opportunities for travel or astrological study.
Demons stealing Piccadilly are possible. Some of the buildings around Piccadilly could have annoyed them sufficiently to make this possible. Aside from churches, one of the buildings at one end of Piccadilly eventually becomes a sort of museum that houses various scientific societies. By removing it you could limit quest for human scientific knowledge. If you are using a cosmology like that of the ancient Egyptians, undead creatures dwell on the other side of the world, and a tunnel gives them the point of entrance demons.
Are they faeries? The lifting is happening near the middle of winter, so it’s a time of high faerie power. Piccadilly is outside the traditional boundaries of London. Piccadilly gets its name from Piccadilly Hall, which was constructed by a middle class merchant who made his money by making picadills, a sort of lace collar. The smoke and noise of industrialisation may have broken an agreement with the early fairies who gave this place to that man, such that they are now reclaiming the land. Alternatively, are they constructing a regio? That the man can see the stars of the southern hemisphere is cosmologically strange unless they are, in some sense, illusory.
It would be strange for earth elementals to take human shapes. If they wished to get rid of the road they would simply submerge it into the earth, or explode it into the sky, so we might ignore this Realm in our analysis.
Do the characters want to prevent or encourage the removal? Once you’ve decided on a Realm for this intervention you need to decide whether this has occurred before. Is the rate or intervention increasing? How can the characters make use of the tunnel, if it really goes to, or displays the sky from, the other side of the world?
Games From Folktales 