"So Far as Any Present Use is Concerned, The Tunnel is an Entire Failure.” Or: Marc Brunel's Thames Tunnel:

In the 1800’s, London was the busiest city in the world. Trade brought goods from all over the globe, and they all came by ship down the Thames, to be unloaded in the various docks and wharves that lined the river.

The city itself was becoming busier too, as these newly arrived goods needed to be distributed from wharves to places of business. With London spreading ever outwards, a new crossing was required to the east of the city, but with so many ships with tall masts and sails coming down the Thames from the sea, a bridge would have to be extremely tall and steep, it seemed impossible. Was there any way a river could be crossed by thousands of people, horses and carts, without building a ship-impeding bridge?

In 1808, Richard Trevithick; inventor and mining engineer, attempted to construct a tunnel running underneath the River Thames in London, connecting the south bank to the north. The project was delayed after a sudden inrush of water flooded the tunnel, and a month after this flood, and a more serious inrush occurred. The tunnel was flooded again, and Trevithick was nearly drowned. Clay was dumped on the river bed to seal the hole and the tunnel was drained but mining was now more difficult.

Marc Brunel

The problem that Trevithick had encountered was the soft ground next to the river, which was soft and sandy and had no cohesion. Unlike more solid, clay-like land, this ground could not support itself when tunneled into, and subsequently was hugely prone to collapsing and vulnerable to seepage of water. With a thousand disastrous and potentially dangerous feet of tunnel having been completed, the general consensus was that a tunnel under the Thames was at best, impractical, and at worst impossible. Civil engineer William Jessop was an influential voice expressing this opinion, and the project was abandoned.

Ten years later, in 1818, engineer Marc Isambard Brunel patented a tunneling device, known as a tunneling shield. This shield was a large, rectangular structure, with three horizontal lines of twelve ‘spaces’ across the width of it, making thirty six ‘spaces’ roughly the size of a wardrobe inside each of which a man would stand with a small shovel, a candle and the minimum of elbow room. In front of each worker there were a series of horizontal boards. The worker unscrewed the top board to expose the earth at the face of the shield. He would dig away at this small portion of earth, and then replace the board, screwing it tightly into the empty space he had just dug away. The worker would then repeat the process with the boards below until he reached the bottom board. Once he had got to the bottom board he would start from the top again. The second time he finished at the bottom board his whole digging position would be jacked forward by around two inches using screw jacks. As the shield moved forward, bricklayers followed, lining the walls, and the process would be started again. Written down, this sounds awfully complicated. The picture helps:

The Thames Tunnel was dug using this process, meaning these workers dug a 1,200 ft tunnel two inches at a time for 1,200 feet across the River Thames. It is thought – whether true or not, I don’t think anyone knows – that Brunel modeled his tunneling shield on the shipworm; a creature that eats through the wooden timbers of ships with its head protected by a hard shell.

The prospect of testing his tunneling shield by constructing a tunnel under the Thames led Brunel to write to as many influential people he could think of who may be able to help him.
Subsequently, in February 1824, an impressive 2,128 people bought shares for £50 each in Brunel’s idea. Four months later the Thames Tunnel Company was formed.

The first stage of the build was to create an entrance to the tunnel. There was not enough space to build long, gentle-gradient ramps in and out of the tunnel for horses, so a vertical brick shaft was built on the soft Rotherhithe bank, and as the shaft became taller and heavier, the ground beneath gave way, leading the shaft to sink down to the depth where the tunnel entrance was planned to be built. This vertical shaft was completed in November 1825, and the tunnelling shield, which had been manufactured at Lambeth by Henry Maudslay's company, was then assembled at the bottom. but despite the tunneling shield, the process was still dangerous and difficult due to the soft ground around the Thames. The ground, though, was not the only problem the project would encounter. The sewers of Joseph Bazalgette were still almost forty years away, and so the Thames was a virtual open sewer surrounding the workers. The tunnel, not being particularly water-tight, seeped the sewage and became damp with it. The air quality underground naturally suffered, with workers feinting, coughing, and having to be pulled from their work and up to ground level to recover in fresh air. There was a more menacing danger to the presence of the sewage too; it gave off methane gas, which, in an environment full of men working by candle-light led to the odd fire-based accident.

Brunel Lowering the Diving Bell

These incidents, however, paled in comparison to some of the more serious dangerous occurrences during the construction.

Many workers, including Brunel himself, soon fell ill from the poor air quality. Resident engineer William Armstrong took ill in April 1826, leaving the engineering team a man down. Marc drafted in his twenty year old son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who took Armstrong’s place.

In May 1827 the tunnel suffered a flood when the miners breached the tunnel wall. Isambard lowered a diving bell from a boat to repair the hole at the bottom of the river, throwing bags filled with clay into the hole in the tunnel's roof. Once the tunnel had been repaired and drained, dignitaries were invited to a banquet inside it.

The Banquet in the Tunnel

The tunnel flooded again in January 1828, in a disaster in which six men died and many others, including Isambard, were almost drowned. To recuperate, he was sent to Clifton in Bristol, where he put himself forward to be the engineer to build a bridge there, amidst much competition. He won the contract, and today we have the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

Meanwhile, back in London, the tunnel was facing financial difficulties after the second flood. The resources Marc Brunel had acquired for the Thames Tunnel Company were spent, and despite his efforts to raise more money with tours of the tunnel, but these were fruitless. The tunnel was sealed up just behind the shield in August 1828. Marc Brunel resigned from his position and offered his help to Isambard in designing the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

The tunnel remained abandoned and sealed for seven years until Marc Brunel raised enough money for the work to continue. The project was plagued by the same floods, gas leaks and sick workers as before, which continued to set work back.

Because of the slow process of the build, the tunnel would not be completed until 1842, seven years after the re-start.

The Thames Tunnel, building of which commenced in January 1825, was finally completed in 1842.

The main reason the tunnel had been created was to allow trade vehicles – namely, horses and carts – to cross the river at this hugely busy point, without the need for a bridge. A bridge was completely impractical, as the thousands of ships that sailed in and out of the port of London – the busiest port in the world at the time – all had tall sails, and would be unable to pass a bridge, hence, the reason for crossing beneath the river, and not over it.

The original plan for the tunnel entrances was to use two large shafts with spiraling ramps running at a very gradual gradient that horses could pull carts down into the tunnel, then up to street level again at the other side.

However, because the project had taken so long to complete, and had taken so much money, there were no funds available to build these ramps, and so the only way in and out of the tunnel was via the spiral staircases in the entrance and exit shafts shown in the pencil drawing on the right. This clearly meant that horses and carts – the very passengers the tunnel was designed and created for – could not use the tunnel. Below is a cross sectional cut-away picture of the entrance shaft and part of the tunnel. Definitely not horse and cart friendly:

Despite this, it opened to the public on 25th March 1843. On 7 November 1842 Brunel suffered a stroke that paralysed his right side for a time, but despite ill health he still took part in the opening ceremony.
On the first day of opening fifty thousand people paid a penny each to walk though the new tunnel. Within the first ten weeks a million people had passed under the river via the new tunnel. With tourists coming from Europe it was deemed a worthy enterprise to set up souvenir stalls inside the tunnel. Shops were set up in the arches and entertainment was put on for pedestrians crossing the river. The tunnel was declared ‘The 8th Wonder of the World’. The novelty of the tunnel, though, soon wore off. After a short amount of time it became populated by hawkers of tatty wares who tried to sell to the pedestrians. It also earned a reputation as a place of business for prostitutes seeking work. This was a blow for the tunnel, with American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne writing of it:

“It (the tunnel) consisted of an arched corridor of apparently interminable length, gloomily lighted with jets of gas at regular intervals ... There are people who spend their lives there, seldom or never, I presume, seeing any daylight, except perhaps a little in the morning. All along the extent of this corridor, in little alcoves, there are stalls of shops, kept principally by women, who, as you approach, are seen through the dusk offering for sale ... multifarious trumpery ... So far as any present use is concerned, the tunnel is an entire failure.”

The Shaft Today - Note the Scarring Where the Stairs Once Were

The East London Railway took over the tunnel in 1865. They wanted to dig new tunnels to link the Thames Tunnel to the national railway network. In 1869 trains did start to run through tunnels where horses and carts should originally have traipsed. 

Twenty six years after the tunnel opened, it was finally carrying out the function it was designed for – carrying goods from north to south beneath the river, albeit by train and not horse and cart.

The tunnel remains in use today as part of the London Underground’s East London Line. Occasionally, the Brunel Museum, located in the old engine room to the tunnel, put on a guided walk through the museum. Keep checking their website here for any future walks.

Modern Photo of entrance shaft taken by David Flett, used with permission. See more of David’s work on FlickR here

The Award Winning Thames - What Was it Like in 1870?

In 1878 more than 600 passengers from the steamship Princess Alice died when the pleasure boat sank after a collision on the Thames. As they swam towards the safety of the shore, the passengers were overcome by the noxious cocktail of pollution in the water.

Then in 1957, the pollution levels became so bad that the River Thames was declared biologically dead. The amount of oxygen in the water fell so low that no life could survive and the mud reeked of rotten eggs.

Fifty years later, the Thames has become a very different place. It teems with life: 125 species of fish swim beneath its surface while more than 400 species of invertebrates live in the mud, water and river banks. Waterfowl, waders and sea birds feed off the rich pickings in the water while seals, dolphins and even otters are regularly spotted between the river banks where it meanders through London.

The Thames has won the world's biggest prize for environmental conservation after a dramatic turnaround which has seen it restored from a "biologically dead" waterway to a healthy river.

The Environment Agency collected the International Theiss River Prize for river management and conservation, worth around £220,000, after the Thames beat competition from China's Yellow River and waterways in Australia and Japan.

Environmental officials now say the Thames is the cleanest it has been in more than 150 years and nearly 400 habitats have now been created to allow wildlife back into the river.

A walk along the Thames is amongst the most pleasant things one can experience in central London, with some really wonderful things to see - particularly from Albert embankment on the south bank, to Tower Bridge, and then back on the north bank past the tower and monument to Victoria embankment. But if we were to go back to the 1870’s and walk from Battersea Bridge heading east, what would we see?

Before the building of Bazalgette’s embankments, the banks of the river were a jumble of warehouses, cranes, docks and jetties and slime covered stone or wooden steps.

On the river, ships from all over the world made for London Bridge and the pool of London to lay anchor, their decks buzzing and alive with activity as sailors went about their work with the Dockers unloading the cargo from the ship.

Small crafts, such as skiffs, lighters and cutters bobbed in the wake of larger vessels. Among the sailing ships with their masts would have been paddle steamers, their massive side-wheels thrashing in the water. With the river being the hub of industry, a constant cloud of dark smoke hung over the river around London Bridge.

Let us go back to the 1870’s and take a tour…

North Bank – Cremorne Gardens:

A pleasure garden that opened in the 1840s in Chelsea, Cremorne incorporated a theatre, dance hall and banqueting hall as well as entertainments such as the bandstand, circus, freak show and American bowling.

During the day the gardens were for the whole family, but when darkness fell it became on outdoor night-club of ill repute with the locals who claimed lewd women operated there amongst the loud music and dancing.

The gardens closed in 1877

South Bank – Battersea Park:

Before 1846 Battersea park was a swamp inhabited by the cities homeless and ne’er-do-wells. The park hosted weekly gypsy horse-fairs. In 1853, it was redeveloped and opened as a public park with, in 1860, a beautiful lake being added, and in 1864 a tropical garden.

North Bank – Millbank Prison:

Built in 1821, Millbank was London’s biggest prison. It was a panopticon design with six radiating wings. The prison was designed by Jeremy bentham and built on seven acres of marshy and damp wasteland right on the river. The prison took in convicts serving longer sentences and was a gloomy and depressing place with an overbearing appearance.

South Bank – Westminster Bridge:

Prior to the building of the embankments in 1864, the banks of the river on either side of Westminster Bridge were occupied by coal barges, mud-banks and a few good houses and ugly wharves.

North Bank – St Paul’s Cathedral:

Now we pass Wren’s Great cathedral, its dome rising into the sky next to the densely packed buildings of the city where the sky is penetrated by church spires, to…

North Bank – St Paul’s Wharf Pier:

…Where an even better view can be appreciated of the church spires built by Wren. Bow church is the largest and most attractive.

London Bridge:

North Bank – Industry:

At both The Billingsgate fish market and the coal exchange, boats are moored. Just off the fish market, boats sell oysters, and eels are sold live from the Dutch eel boats moored mid-stream.

The warehouses at the docks employ between 500 and 700 men, dependant on size, and are fitted with steam lifts, hoists, hydrants and other machinery, and are in direct communication with each of the company’s docks via telegraph.

North Bank Docks:

St Katherine’s Dock is enclosed by warehouses, over which the masts of the larger shipping vessels are to be seen.

The London Docks contain the famous wine vaults in which up to 65,000 pipes of wine can be stowed. The tobacco docks can also be found here in Wapping.

West India Docks run right across the Isle of Dogs and the crowd of masts seen across the pasturage look like a grove of leafless trees.

South Bank Docks:

The Grand Surrey Docks are devoted to the timber trade and the corn trade, as are the Dommercial Docks.

These days, the view on our walk is vastly, vastly different. We can still see some evidence of the days when the Thames was the lifeblood of the city, the ghosts of some docks and wharves still remain, but most have been converted into flats or just pulled down altogether.

Who knows how much longer these relics will remain before all links to the days of the river being a vital and huge cog in English commerce? See them while you can.

The busiest part of the river, at London Bridge can be seen the stairs of the penny steam-boats, landing and taking in the West End or Greenwich passengers, the black smoke billowing from its funnel and its bell ringing. The traffic, which is dense on the river here, consists of coal barges, Thames hoys (bright coloured and picturesque barges laden with straw etc) Above the river, London Bridge itself is crammed with slow-moving cabs, omnibusses and goods wagons.

Back on the river, passing under the bridge we see the silent highway is crowded with ships as far as the eye can see.

Modern Day River Useage

Bringing us up to modern times just for a moment, anyone living - or perhaps more pertinently, working – in London will be aware that their journey to work on Sunday 3^rd and Monday 4^th October will be hampered greatly by a tube strike.

This also happened on Monday 6^th September, but if the media are to be believed, Londoners coped relatively well with the alternative routes provided by TFL (Transport for London) which included utilizing the existing services, and providing extra transport options on the river Thames.

The Thames has been something of a bugbear of mine for around two years now since I took a Thames Clipper service from Embankment pier to Greenwich with Miss Amateur Casual, and found it without a doubt the best transport journey through London we have ever made.

The journey coincided with a bit of research I was doing at the time on the use of the River between 1860 and 1875, and all the references to this period of river-use pointed to the waterway being constantly busy and bustling, and it was even given the moniker “The Silent Highway” such was its heavy stream of traffic.

Goods from as far away as China and India were sailed back to London on huge Clippers which would be unloaded at docks and the goods put in the great warehouses for distribution.

I may do a more in-depth article on the Thames later as it was an integral part of Victorian London life, but to concentrate on the modern era for a moment, my trip on the clipper highlighted the saddening fact that we simply do not use this river to its full potential. 150 odd years ago there were steamers ferrying passengers up and down the river to the many piers, whether it be for pleasure, at Cremorne and Vauxhall gardens, or work at St Pauls Wharf, Blackfriars or the Commercial Docks etc. There were Rafter-men, who floated goods (mostly timber) down the river for the docks, and Watermen who were the river equivalent of cabs (Although the high number of steamers toward the end of the century saw the number of Watermen begin to decline) and, as already mentioned, the goods being brought into docks from all over the world (which began to decline as train usage rose).

However, if you take a walk down the river now you will see a few tourist boats, a hideous creation known as a “Duck Tour” (the vehicle is grotesquely ugly – an aquatic army van it seems that has been painted yellow, but the tour looks marvellous) the aforementioned Thames Clipper service, the odd private speedboat and perhaps a police boat. Other than that the river is barely used, but surely an artery that cuts through the centre of such a vibrant city could be put to better use?

I can think of no better journey to work in the morning than that of a Thames Clipper, upon which you can get a drink from the bar and gaze out at the river and the passing buildings (some interesting old wharves converted into flats can be seen, as well as the obvious St Pauls, Tower of London and Tower Bridge.

But I wondered, is it just London? Are there any rivers in Britain (or anywhere) that are still properly used? Last year we spent a few days in Budapest, Hungary, and the same could be said of the Danube – other than the tourist boat that we were on, the river was largely bare.

I’d be interested to hear if any UK rivers still provide an essential service, so if you know of any, please leave a comment.  

If you will be affected by the tube strikes, you may find this link to the LBC website helpful, which contains all the latest.