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Amazing! You're a font of knowledge. I've always enjoyed history, especially when it's retold through a context - ie, this, not direct from a book.
RE: Living in sewers. Like many things, I'm sure it's possible, but I find it hard to beleive that someone would want to - there are much nicer, more convenient places above ground.
Living in drains, train tunnels etc [ie the amtrack tunnels over in NY] etc are definitely practiced.
In regards to prospecting - there really seems to be no limit to what you'll find washed down.
A drain I did in Tokyo was fairly large - 5m x 2m in dimension, which went back for about 30m before it was curtained off and the sewer part started.. (If you're ever underground and come to a section that's got mist.. congratulations, you're in a sewer ;) )
Within those 25m, I found no less than 7 mobile phones, 6 credit cards, 1 pearl bracelet and a variety of other crap.
There's a drain we do at home that runs under a main street - we go in every 6 months or so, and can easily collect enough cash to shout everyone dinner afterwards :D
In a final tangent of history - you mentioned abandoned tube lines and bells, and that leads to some amazing history artefacts in Australia.
The station 'St James' in Sydney has disused platforms and tunnels that run parallel to the active tunnels. While the hidden platforms are used mainly to store boxes of papers etc, if you crawl under them and keep ging, you enter the St James tunnels - tunnels that were converted to blast shields during the war as a refuge.
At the far end of these tunnels, you can see grafiti in *pencil* on one of the walls from the 40's - where soldiers wrote messagges to their girlfriends, and recorded their serial numbers and rank etc - totally amazing.
However, one of the most interesting features is a room - totally unlit, and slightly flooded - and in the middle is a bell, raised slightly above the water.
Story goes that during the war to boost morale, a bell that tolled in the fashion of Big Ben was comissioned, so it could remind people of 'the motherland' etc - as time progressed, it was moved to the St James tunnels, where it's been chilling ever since.
Amazing stuff!
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