Tunnel Time

Going on the track and roaming around London Underground’s tunnels is something that I cannot get away from in my job, not that I would want to. Before I joined the Underground, I had always been fascinated, not so much by the railway itself, but by the subterranean world that is beneath our feet wherever we go in this city. I remember well the excitement of my first trackwalk as we set off in to the cut-and-cover tunnels between Liverpool Street and Moorgate, and the similar feeling I felt as I explored the old City and South London Railway tunnels which are still to be found mothballed behind innocuous locked doors at London Bridge station.

Although I still enjoy it, walking the tunnels and track is so much a part of my job that I would no longer jump at the chance to walk in any old tunnel as I used to when I began working for LU. On Thursday however, I saw a notice on the LU intranet asking for volunteers to take members of the public down into the Thames Tunnel between Wapping and Rotherhithe, and I couldn’t write my email to the organisers fast enough.

The Thames Tunnel was built between 1825 and 1843 by Marc Brunel, with his son Isambard acting as the Chief Engineer at just 21 years of age. When it was finished, it was the first tunnel ever to go underneath a navigable waterway and was a marvel of Victorian engineering, though of course it had been begun two monarchs earlier under William IV. You can find some fairly good histories of the tunnel on the internet, but suffice it to say that the tunnel was a commercial failure and was made into a railway tunnel in 1869, passing to the Metropolitan Railway in 1878. It was part of London Underground until 2007, when it closed to become a part of the extended London Overground network which will open in April this year.

Happily, some bright spark came up with the idea of letting the general public go down into the tunnel for Friday and Saturday of last week, which is where we rejoin the story of me volunteering to shepherd those people around. The work to upgrade the Overground was halted for two days to allow these visits, which sold out incredibly quickly despite what by all accounts was an incredibly bad online booking system. Volunteer guides came not just from London Overground but from all over TfL, including people from back office functions, London Buses and those of us from LU. We were on hand to give the obligatory Health and Safety briefing, answer questions about the railway or the tunnel and to generally ensure everyone was safe and sound. The real stars of the show were the fantastic Blue Badge guides, who entertained and informed us with facts and anecdotes about the construction and use of the Tunnel.

I must confess that I was expecting the people taking the tours to be a particular type of man, and so I was incredibly pleased that the demographic of all the groups I accompanied to be pretty much exactly the same as if we had simply kidnapped people from the street outside on a normal day and dragged them downstairs! Couples and groups of friends of both sexes tramped through the Tunnel, no doubt eager to take TfL and GLA up on an offer which will probably not recur in their lifetime: the chance to walk through a railway tunnel, and not just any railway tunnel, but the first one ever to have been built beneath a river. I enjoyed myself enormously, and if anyone reading this went down there then I hope that you did too.

I took some pictures, but they were not very good. Diamond Geezer and Urban 75 got some good shots (though I found some of Urban’s history to be a bit suspect), and Annie Mole has done something of a blogging roundup of the event.