March 12, 2010 13:13
I never had much interest in London’s subterranean bits until my Dad took me on a tour of Victoria station’s hidden depths. This was the late 80s, and he was then a contractor working for London Underground to improve station facilities. Together, with a big bunch of keys, we went to those parts of the station that commuters never see. Mysterious doors on platforms were opened to reveal networks of corridors filled with machinery or left damp and abandoned. In one room there was a massive well, dank, dark and dripping. Another had walls covered in thrillingly pornographic graffiti. And every now and then our adventure would end at a closed door, for which nobody had the key and everybody assumed was part of the government’s clandestine tunnels. Secrets within secrets! I was hooked.
Since then I have been under the skirts of the city a number of times. In the crypt of a convent at Marble Arch; in the vaults of the Bank of England; underneath Tower Bridge; in the deep-level Tube shelter at Chancery Lane, built for Blitz protection but later requisitioned by spooks; under Waterloo Station for immersive theatre that reminded me of ‘Doom’; in the Fleet sewer; in Henry VIII’s wine cellar under the Ministry of Defence; and in the old Holborn tramway tunnel under Kingsway. I’m like a ferret, if there’s a hole, I’m in it.*
This morning’s escapade took me – and every other underground/transport nerd in London – to Rotherhithe station for a very rare chance to see inside the first tunnel built under the Thames, indeed, the first underwater tunnel built anywhere in the world.
The Thames Tunnel was started in 1807, abandoned and then taken up again by Marc Brunel in 1823, who had invented a new form of tunnelling machine modelled on a woodworm. Brunel, accompanied by his son Isambard Kingdom, abandoned work again in 1828 after loss of life due to pollution and occasional inundations, but picked it up 1835, completing the tunnel in 1843. Marc died in 1849. Read a proper history here or here.
It remained a foot tunnel until the 1860s, when it was converted into a railway tunnel for the East London line, linking Rotherhithe and Wapping. This weekend, the tunnel reopened as a foot tunnel for what we were assured will be the very last time in its history, which is just the sort of hyperbole I like to hear on a Friday morning.
The tunnel is now pretty much indistinguishable from any other underground line. The only sense you get that you are heading under the river is that it is rather damp and chilly. Although most of the tunnel’s original brickwork has been concreted over, there are some areas where you can still the original bricks, beautiful but damaged.
Arches bisect the tunnel throughout its length. These were originally used as small shops, as the tunnel became the world’s first underwater shopping arcade. These spaces are tiny, and would have been cramped, dark, cold and damps places to work from. I imagine they are rather like those booth-cum-shops you get along Brixton’s Atlantic Road, where people flog phonecards and reggae from the stairwells of blocks of flats.
Here, though, you can get a sense of the detailing that distinguishes so much Victorian architecture.
And that was it, an entertaining diversion into the depths of history, made all the better for the fact that I happened to bump into fellow blogger Darryl of 853 for the first time and so got the chance to have a good natter about politics and football while walking through a landmark Victorian tunnel several metres beneath the Thames. (Darryl’s post is now up and Annie Mole is rounding up some of the London bloggers who have written about the tour.)
A coda: upon leaving Rotherhithe station, Darryl and I were accosted by a young man from the Southwark News, eager for eyewitness reports of this momentous occasion and then slightly disconcerted that he had somehow managed to approach a pair of freelance journalists masquerading as innocent bystanders. I suggested he choose an alternative career for me; crisp shop proprietor, perhaps?
Posted by peterwatts1975
Categories: History, London, Subterranean
Tags: Brunel Tunnel, Rotherhithe
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Great post & thanks for taking the time to sharing this walk with brill photos too. Have added to my blog post on this today.
By Annie Mole on March 12, 2010 at 15:29
Hi Annie
Nice round-up. I assume you’ll be going down there sometime this weekend – I know at least two other bloggers who are waiting their turn…
By peterwatts1975 on March 12, 2010 at 15:35
Unfortunately not – even though I twittered about the tickets last Friday, the site was borked so couldn’t buy & when I remembered to call they were all sold out! Pleased it’s really popular & like you noticed it was Twitter trending at some point today – bizarre.
Hopefully they’ll hold another one next year or make it an annual event??!!
By Annie Mole on March 12, 2010 at 17:33
[…] our gloves – which had become sticky and sweaty during our tour. I shared the tour with Peter Watts, who remarked on how many women there were on the tour. Old railway tunnels usually bring only a […]
By Inside the Thames Tunnel « 853 on March 12, 2010 at 15:30
I am so glad you enjoyed the event, I certainly did, especially the walk. Sad to think we shall be the last members opf public to do this. (I know TfL said they could have booked out the tour 200 times over).
By Ray Frensham on March 17, 2010 at 12:41
[…] cover the history of the tunnel to a great extent, as it has been covered much more eloquently and in richer detail than I could give you. Instead, here are a few photos of the evening, which we started by visiting […]
By Adam Wright – Photography » Blog Archive » Thames Tunnel on May 21, 2010 at 17:47
[…] for the mysterious parts of the city that lie beneath their feet – the weekend opening of Brunel’s Thames Tunnel earlier this year proved to be extraordinarily popular – and a dedicated museum to […]
By The Old London Underground Company « The Great Wen on June 16, 2010 at 10:56
[…] wanting to know a bit about the history of this line should visit PeteW’s excellent website The Great Wen. I believe he lives in the great darkness that is South […]
By Alice, The Palace and the Absence of Malice on August 8, 2010 at 19:26
[…] wanting to know a bit about the history of this line should visit PeteW’s excellent website The Great Wen. I believe he lives in the great darkness that is South […]
By Alice, The Palace and the Absence of Malice | Chelsea FC Supporter Info on August 29, 2010 at 10:30
[…] a part-time moleman who has never been inside Aldwych, I was down there like a greedy ferret in a goldmine. Aldwych, a […]
By Underground again at Aldwych | The Great Wen on September 24, 2010 at 08:19
[…] an abandoned shopping centre, a gorgeous listed church, a power station turned art gallery, a historic foot tunnel, London’s only memorial to the Blitz, a beach, mudlarks searching for Tudor bric-a-brac, Wapping […]
By Wappingness | The Great Wen on December 18, 2013 at 11:42
[…] https://greatwen.com/2010/03/12/under-the-thames-in-the-brunel-tunnel-or-how-i-became-a-moleman/ […]
By Lonely Landscape | Josh Finche on March 11, 2014 at 19:44