A couple of posts ago I wrote that I’ve completed the London Bridges challenge. If you were kind enough to follow what I wrote about drawing all of the stations on the London Underground, then you might remember how I went on to extend the challenge to include every station on the London Overground and the Docklands Light Railway. It’s okay if you didn’t, I can’t say that I blame you. Well, a similar thing has occurred to me that I should extend this challenge to include all of the tunnels beneath the Thames in the Greater London area.
Well, I say all of them. I don’t actually mean tunnels
which have only ever carried utility cables. There are nine of these that I
know of in the specified area. However there are 17 tunnels that have carried
the public in one form of transport or another, only one of which no longer
does so. These are the ones I want to work on.
Drawing tunnels, however, is by no means as straightforward
as drawing bridges. So I’ve had to think about the ways I want to do it. The
foot tunnels (and the tower subway) are easy enough, since I will draw the
entrances. The road tunnels, ditto. The train tunnels, well, this calls for a
little more thought. If you’ve ever travelled in a ube train you’ll know that
there really ain’t a great deal to see in the tunnels themselves. So what I
planned to do was to sketch the exterior of a station at either end of the
tunnel, or the platform of the station. So far it’s tended to be he platforms.
Which is not necessarily the best decision since I’ve been getting a bit bored
with the constant drawing of platforms. Still, soldier on.
Victoria Line tunnel – Vauxhall to Pimlico
Pimlico is interesting because it wasn’t on the original
plans for the Victoria Line, which meant that it was the last to open. This may
account for the fact that all of the other stations on the Victoria Line also
connect with at least one other line, but Pimlico doesn’t. Pimlico does at
least serve people visiting the original Tate Gallery, Tate Britain.
*Digression Warning* I grew up in the London Borough of
Ealing and one of the things my home borough is renowned for is Ealing Film
Studios. In the immediate post war period Ealing studios made a series of
comedy films which were extremely successful and one of the most famous of
these was called “Passport to Pimlico”. Basically the plot concerned the
residents of Pimlico finding that Pimlico had been given to the Dukes of
Burgundy in the middle ages and this had never been repealed. Said residents
then throw away their ration books and assert their independence. Allowing for
the way that a nation’s collective sense of humour can shift over the decades
it’s a funny film, but one which also manages to make a point about post war
austerity in the Britain in which my parents grew up.
At the other end of the tunnel is Vauxhall Station. Back in
the good old days when I was cycling past the station on my way between home
and university, old Vauxhall station really wasn’t a lot to write home about.
It’s still there, but what has grown up around it is remarkable. Vauxhall has
become a huge transport hub, and the entrances to the subterranean tube
stations are visions of the future in chromium and glass. I’ll be honest, when
work was going on a couple of years ago and I was visiting London with my
daughter and grandson we took a double decker bus from Wimbledon to Vauxhall
Bridge and I found the whole scale of the tube and bus station complex rather
oppressive. That’s just a personal opinion and please feel free to disagree.
Jubilee Line Extension tunnel – Waterloo to
Westminster
The Jubilee Line section of Westminster station opened in
1999 and I visited it within a year of the opening. This was the London
Underground Jim, but not as I knew it. Once you go through the entrance you are
struck by the fact that this is by no means a beautiful station, but my
goodness, it has a scale that inspires admiration. The elevators to the deep
level Jubilee Line platforms are supported by columns and even today to ride
them is to experience what early 20th century visions of the city of
the future thought it would be like.
In the original plans for the Jubilee Line it was never
envisaged that the line would pass through Westminster. When the time came at
the end of the 20th century to make the Jubilee Line extension the
decision was made to connect with Waterloo station, and a tunnel between a new
deep level Westminster station and Waterloo seemed the best way of doing it.
I’ve used metros and subways in many European countries,
and Westminster station reminds me quite a lot of an archetypal European Metro
station. Only the Jubilee Line on the London Underground has automatic doors
allowing passengers to access the trains and this is far more common in Europe.
Bakerloo and Northern Line Tunnel – Waterloo to
Embankment
The Bakerloo Line of the London Underground began life as
the Baker Street and Waterloo Railway. Accprding to various sources they had he
devil’s own job raising finances, eventually selling out to Charles Tyson
Yerkes Underground Electric Railways of London, laying the foundations for what
would eventually become London Transport.
The tunnel benefited greatly from the experience of
building deep level tube lines which had been gained by the engineers of the
City and South London Railway, the world’s first deep level underground
railway. Greathead adapted the tunnel shield invented by Marc Brunel (more on
him later) for the Thames tunnel. Instead of having brick walls built up behind
the shield as it was cut and pushed forward, the tunnel linings were made of
cast iron rings bolted together. This had two benefits – the workers were at
less risk of the tunnel collapsing, which is never a bad thing, and they could
also progress much more quickly. Despite this there were still several blowouts
during construction. The north tunnel was built first, and the southern one
begun when it was completed.
As for the Northern Line, well this had its origins in two
railways companies. The City and South London Railway, as already mentioned was
the world’s first deep level tube line and originally ran between Stockwell and
it’s first terminus in the City at King William Street. This was later
abandoned. The Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway opened in 1907,
running from Charing Cross north to Hampstead. It was soon extended to
Embankment. The 1926 tunnels were built as part of a scheme to link the two sections
of the Northern Line by making it possible to travel directly from Embankment to
Kennington, ad it made sense to create an interchange with the Bakerloo Line at
Waterloo in the process.
What do we know about Waterloo? Well, according to Abba at
Waterloo is where Napoleon did surrender. Good song, although not historically
accurate. Napoleon fled after the battle and didn’t actually surrender until he
was on board HMS Bellerophon. Still, the station isn’t named after the Battle
of Waterloo. The station is named after nearby Waterloo Bridge. THAT was named
after the battle. In fact that station was originally called Waterloo Bridge,
but the Bridge was shortly dropped from the name.
The station predates the underground by about 15 years,
opening in 1848. I made the point earlier about the relative lack of
Underground Stations south of the Thames and if you need any more proof of the
way that the south of the river has always been the poor relation of the
Underground network, try this. After the first Underground staions in London
opened in 1863 it was 35 years before Waterloo got its first underground
station, despite being one of the busiest railway station in the country. That
was the Waterloo ad City Line, about which I’ll write more whe the time comes.
The Bakerloo Line opened in 1906 and the station building was a rather nice
Leslie Green job, with his trademark oxblood red tiles. This was demolished to
make way for the Festival of Britain in 1951. The temporary station put in its
place looked like a really interesting modern design, but it was replaced by a
far less interesting station building incorporated into the Shell Mex Building.
That too was more recently demolished. A couple of years ago as part of the
development of the site a new station entrance opened. This is of a far more
interesting appearance, a modern building with echoes of motifs occurring in
the work of Leslie Green. I like it.
Embankment, then. As far as I know nobody ever claimed that
Napoleon did surrender at Embankment, which is just as well because as we know,
he didn’t. The station was opened as early as 1870, because its also on the
District and Circle lines. Like the Metropolitan Railway, the Metropolitan
District Railway was built as a sub-surface railway, with the underground
stations being constructed by the cut and cover method. Dig a trench for the
railway, make the tunnels and stations, cover them over, job’s a good ‘un. The
first deep level platforms for the Bakerloo opeed in 1906, and for the Northern
in 1914, several years before the tunnel under the river to Waterloo was built.
Here’s a rather interesting fact. The Bakerloo called the station Embankment,
while the District had always called it Charing Cross!
The railway tunnels between Waterloo and Embankment were
lucky during the war. They were not damages, however a disused loop tunnel was
struck by a bomb, breached and flooded. It had been sealed off when it was
abandoned and caused no damage to the network when it was hit. Electrically
powered flood gates were applied to either end of the tunnel in the early
months of the war.
Waterloo and City Line – Waterloo to
Bank/Monument
Put yourself in the position of the London and South
Western Railway (LSWR).You’ve created your London terminus at Waterloo
(Bridge). You are bringing huge numbers of workers from outside London into the
capital every morning, and taking them home every evening. A very large number
of your more affluent (hence desirable) customers work in the Square Mile of
the City of London. And that is quite a step from Waterloo, believe you me, and
they ain’t happy. It makes sense to connect somehow with the City.
However. Building railways and railway lines in the UK and
especially London was not an easy business. Following the Railway mania of the
late 1840’s investors had become a lot more cautious. So had Parliament. In
1846 alone, over 200 Acts of Parliament for new railways were passed. So a
number of schemes were proposed and reached various stages of development but
none of them came anywhere close to fruition. Finally the proposal for what
became the Waterloo and City Line was put forward in 1891. The LSWR were very
much in support although the line would be independent at least at the start.
It took two years for the proposal to result in the necessary Act of
Parliament.
Engineered using the Greathead Shield (James Greathead was
one of the chief engineers on the project) the line reaches its deepest point
beneath the Thames.
We’ve already said a bit about the Waterloo Underground
stations. The Waterloo and City Line was the first o serve Bank Station. Only,
it wasn’t called Bank station, it was called City station, which does actually
make sense of calling the line the Waterloo and City line. At more or less the
same time the Central London Railway – the core of the Central Line – were
building into the station and they were the first ones to call it Bank Station.
There you go.
Incidentally, at the time of writing and for large parts of
its history, I think that the Waterloo and City Line is the only tunnel under
the Thames that doesn’t work at weekends.
In the picture I’ve drawn a 1940 stock train, partly
because these were the trains that ran along the ’Drain’, as the line was
nicknamed when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s. As for the line itself, this was
continually owned by mainline railway companies – the LSWR from 1906, the
Southern Railway in 1921 and British Railways in 1948. It wasn’t until 1994
that it was bought by London Underground. Mind you, they only had to pay a quid
for it, so fair’s fair. Coming back to the 1940s rolling stock, on the surface
it really looked quite like a tube train. But there were things about I that
were more like a British Railways train. On the odd occasions I’ve used the
line since the 80s, that’s pretty much how I’ve felt about the whole line. It’s
like the Tube. . . yet not quite. No, I can’t be much clearer than that.
Northern Line – London Bridge to Bank/Monument
We’ve already discussed the Northern line. So let’s start
off by discussing London Bridge station. There’s quite a bit to say. London
Bridge is the oldest ailway station in Central London. It was originally built
by the London and Greenwich Railway and it opened in 1836. During the 19th
century it served a number of different railway companies before coming under
the Southern Railway in 1921, and then British Railways in 1947.
There was no underground station at London Bridge until the
year 1900. The unusual thing about this was that the tunnel which carried the
City and South London Railway (C&SLR) beneath the Thames had already had
opened 10 years earlier. For reasons best known to themselves the C&SLR did
not create a station at London Bridge in their original line from King William
Street to Stockwell. The station at the southern end of the tunnel underneath
the river was Borough.
King William Street was proven to be unsuitable in the
first years of the line’s operation. Trains had to face a steep incline up from
the cross river tunnel into the station and the original electric locomotives
used on the line were underpowered and could only reach King William Street
with some difficulty. When the railway undertook to extend the line to Moorgate
they also took the decision to abandon King William Street. The original
tunnels were blocked up and a new pair constructed along with a new underground
station at London Bridge.
Tower Subway
Alone of all the tunnels that I’ve included in my set of
drawings, the Tower Subway is not open to the public. But it was when it was
built and to my mind it is a special case. Or to put it another way, it’s my
game and I make the rules.
So, hen, the Tower Subway. This is a tunnel running from
Tower Hill on the north side to Vine Lane off Tooley Street on the south side.
The Tower Subway was built using the Barlow-Greathead shield tunnelling method
which would later be adopted for many deep level tube lines in London and
elsewhere. Peter Barlow patented a shield design for digging out tunnels and
applying cast iron rings to the walls, but it was Barlow’s former pupil James
Greathead who patented the machine to apply the all-important grouting needed
to make the tunnel safe and secure.
When the tunnel was complete the floor was lain with a
narrow gauge railway. One railway car, carrying a maximum of 12 passengers was
hauled across by stationary steam engines on either side, pulling the car along
by cable. This was not a conspicuous or commercial success and the company went
bankrupt before the end of the opening year, 1870. The railway was removed in
December of the same year.
The tunnel reopened as a foot tunnel on Christmas Eve 1870,
for the toll of a halfpenny. It was successful for a while, too. Around twenty
thousand people a week used the tunnel at its height. However, this golden
period of the tunnel subway’s life was curtailed with the opening of nearby
Tower Bridge – which had no tolls - in 1894. By 1897 the subway’s days of being
open to the public were over. It was sold to the London Hydraulic Power Company
and served as a hydraulic mains.
A bomb exploded very close to the tunnel in 1940, but it
did not penetrate the tunnel ad although some repair work was needed the tunnel
was found to be in generally very good repair.
The former hydraulic tubes now carry fibre optic cables and
the tunnel also carries water mains. The original northern entrance on Tower
Hill still stands, but the southern one was demolished and replaced in the 90s.
Thames Tunnel – Rotherhithe to Wapping Overground
As we’ve seen, there are many tunnels beneath the Thames.
However, there is only one Thames Tunnel. This was the first tunnel built
beneath the Thames. In fact, it was the first tunnel built under a navigable
river in Britain. In Europe. In fact it was the first in the whole world.
From the second half of the 18th century there
was an increasing need for cross river connections as London grew as a port. As
a concept the appeal of a tunnel is that it causes no obstruction to the river
and places no restriction on shipping. In reality, though, while it’s difficult
and dangerous to built a bridge across a river such as the Thames, the danger
and difficulty increase exponentially when you try to build a tunnel. As great
an engineer as Richard Trevithick failed to do so between 1805 and 1809. He was
using tried and tested tunneling methods he had developed in Cornish mines, but
these were impractical for the soft clay and quicksand beneath the Thames.
Marc Brunel is probably most famous today for being the
father of the illustrious Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Marc Brunel had first
emigrated to New York during the French Revolution, then moved to London 1799,
where he married Sarah Kingdom. During the Napoleonic Wars Brunel invented
machinery which automated the production of pulley blocks for the Royal Navy.
They dragged their heels over payment, and debt would be a problem for him for
years to come.
As early as the second decade of the 19th century Brunel had turned his genius towards the problems of tunnelling. He took inspiration from the teredo navalis – the common shipworm and the way that it lines its tunnels with excreted material. Brunel invented and in 1818 patented a tunneling shield device. His shield was a large, rectangular, scaffold-like iron structure with three levels and twelve sections per level and a solid weight-bearing top. The earth behind the face of the shield was kept in place by planks. One plank at a time could be removed, the earth behind it excavated, and then the plank removed and another replaced. Once the twelve sections had been completely excavated, then the shield could be pushed forward by hydraulic jacks, and the bare walls of the tunnel could be faced with bricks.
The
shield offered the real possibility that a tunnel could be built underneath the
Thames. By 1824 Brunel had enough financial support, when the Thames Tunnel
Company was formed.
The start of the work in 1825 was ingenious, at least. At the southern end in Rotherhithe, Brunel constructed a huge metal ring, rather like a gigantic pastry cutter. A brick tower was built on top, while earth was excavated from inside, thus sinking the shaft to the requisite depth. Actually, therein lay something of a problem. Brunel’s designs foresaw that the tunnel would never be more than 14 feet underneath the riverbed. Thus the construction of the tunnel was plagued by floods. Brunel decided that this was just the sort of project for his 18-year-old nipper Isambard to cut his teeth upon. The work was fraught with difficulties, and in one serious break-in Isambard was nearly drowned when the Thames broke in and flooded the tunnel. The money ran out in 1828 and the tunnel was sealed. Young Isambard went away and designed the original Hungerford Bridge and the Clifton Suspension Bridge. By 1834 the Company had made enough money to start work again, and the tunnel was finally completed in 1842. Brunel Snr. had been knighted on the instigation of Prince Albert the previous year.
Prior to becoming a railway tunnel, it was never a success. It had been designed for both foot and horse drawn traffic. However, there was never the money to build the required approaches to the tunnel, and so the only entrances were through the stairways built into the access shafts at Rotherhithe and Wapping. The tunnel was finally bought by the East London Railway in 1865 and was opened to rail traffic in 1869.
In 2006 the control of the East London line and therefore the tunnel was transferred to London Overground.
When you stand on the
platforms of Wapping Station, you just don’t tend to pay that much attention to
the entrance to the Thames tunnel. No, what you can’t help noticing is how
narrow the platforms are. Extremely narrow, in fact, I’d go so far as to say dangerous.
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