Tonight I was down in the basement of the London Transport Museum over in Covent Garden for a lecture by Robert Hulse, the erudite and witty Director of the Brunel Museum over in Rotherhithe, on the Thames Tunnel. This lecture is part of a series of events looking at the new London Overground service, ‘Overground Uncovered – Life along the line’.
What now serves as the route of the London Overground between the north and south of the Thames started its life as the most ambitious project of Isambard Kingdom Brunel and his father, Marc (who was a Frenchman – bet you didn’t know that!), to relieve the congestion of boat traffic on the river by allowing carts of goods to be transported under the river itself. Using engineering techniques that were invented specifically for this project (but which are now, in a rather more mechanised form, used to bore large tunnels around the world – the Channel Tunnel for example) work on the tunnel started in 1825. 36 men, working in two hour shifts due to the horrendous working conditions, inched forward (in fact, two inches at a time) through the soft London clay towards their destination on the north bank of the Thames.
Over the life of the project there were two major floods of the tunnel, as boat anchors and the like broke through above. Isambard Kingdom Brunel barely escaped the first with his life and was sent to Clifton in Bristol to convalesce – the rest, as they say, is history. While he was there he designed the Clifton Suspension Bridge, the SS Great Britain and a host of other engineering marvels. On returning to London the investors had lost confidence in the project, and it required a PR miracle, in the form of a banquet held in the tunnel under the river and attended by Brunel’s friend the Duke of Wellington, to get the finances back on track. After the second flood, with private investors’ confidence completely shattered, the Brunels had to turn to the Government to fund its completion, who strangely enough agreed. The ease with which they obtained the additional money was probably due to the influence of the Prime Minister at the time, who just happened to be the Duke of Wellington…
In 1843 the Thames Tunnel was finally opened, but had been completed without the ramps required to ferry goods through it, so the Brunels did the next best thing to earn money from the venture, turning it into a tourist attraction. The many arches between the southbound and northbound tunnels were turned into souvenir shops where you could get all kinds of commemorative items (or as Robert aptly described them in his lecture this evening, ‘tourist tat’). Naturally enough, this being a dimly lit underground space, over time the tunnel gained a rather seedy reputation for being a haven for all sorts of drug taking, thievery and prostitution which only increased as the shopkeepers left to ply their trade safely above ground. An attempt was made to dispel this atmosphere in later years by turning the entire tunnel into a vast entertainment complex, with fire-eaters, jugglers, acrobats, singers and dancers. While this succeeded for a while, their ideas eventually ran out and in 1865 the tunnel was sold to the East London Railway.
Obviously with a frequent railway service running through it, possibilities to visit the tunnel on foot are very few and far between these days, but of course you can see it whenever you like on the southbound Overground line from Dalston Junction. You can, however, take one of the fairly frequent tours of the large main chamber which was the first space constructed as part of the project, the Grand Entrance Hall, and which sits above the tunnel in Rotherhithe (and which Robert reminded us, can also be hired out for corporate events!), and also visit the Brunel Museum which sits next door which contains paintings and sketches by Brunel (he was an accomplished watercolorist), as well as many models and other historical artifacts.
I should also mention that the London Transport Museum, where the lecture took place tonight, in addition to its massive collection of static displays has a new exhibition on at the moment, with a series of associated talks, ‘Under Attack – London, Coventry and Dresden‘. The exhibition explores the role of public transport workers in keeping their respective populations moving, or indeed safe in tunnels, throughout this period of the Blitz. The next lecture in the series is on 15 February, when Oliver Green gives his talk, ‘Wheels Under Fire’. If it’s anything like this evening’s lecture it will have you on the edge of your seat throughout!
