The Victorian Era

Who Built the First Underwater Tunnel

Article · Science & Invention · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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The first underwater tunnel in the world was the Thames Tunnel, built by the engineer Marc Isambard Brunel and his son Isambard Kingdom Brunel between 1825 and 1843, running under the River Thames between Rotherhithe and Wapping in east London. The tunnel, 1,300 feet long, was the first major civil engineering project to be built under a navigable waterway using a method, the tunnelling shield, that has become the standard for modern tunnel construction. The tunnel was a triumph of engineering, a financial disaster, and an attraction for nearly a century before it was sold to a railway company in 1865 and absorbed into the East London Line, which is now the Windrush Line of the London Overground. The story of the tunnel is part of the wider history of Victorian Engineering Marvels and of Transport in the Victorian Era.

The Engineering Challenge

The idea of a tunnel under the Thames had been proposed as early as the late eighteenth century, but the engineering problems were formidable. The river bed was treacherous, the water seeped through the soft alluvial clay, and the previous attempts, including one by the engineer Ralph Dodd in 1798 and another by the engineer Robert Vazie in 1807-09, had been abandoned because of flooding. The engineer who finally solved the problem was Marc Isambard Brunel, a French-born engineer who had been working in England since 1799 and who had been impressed by the way the shipworm, Teredo navalis, bored through ship timbers, leaving a hard, protective layer behind it. Brunel patented a tunnelling shield in January 1818, a device that would protect the workers as they dug through the soft ground of the river bed, and he exhibited a model at the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1818.

The tunnelling shield was a rectangular iron frame, divided into 36 separate cells, in which a workman could stand and remove a small section of the river bed at a time. The shield was pushed forward by screw jacks against the brickwork of the tunnel, and the brickwork was built up behind it as the shield advanced. The shield was an invention of extraordinary importance for the history of the Victorian Engineering Marvels, and it is the direct ancestor of the shields used to build the modern London Underground, the Crossrail tunnels, the Channel Tunnel, and many other modern tunnels around the world. The Brunel shield, as it became known, was one of the great Victorian inventions, and it is described in Victorian Inventions.

The Construction of the Tunnel

Work on the Thames Tunnel began in March 1825, on the Rotherhithe bank. The shaft, of 50 feet diameter, was sunk into the river bank to a depth of 76 feet, and the shield was assembled at the bottom. The first few years of the work were relatively successful, and the tunnel was driven about 50 feet a week through the soft alluvial clay, and the shaft at Wapping was begun in 1826. The shield was later increased to 38 cells, and it was worked by teams of miners, each of whom removed a slice of clay from his own cell. But the conditions were horrific: the tunnel was constantly flooded, the workers suffered from sewage gas and from foul air, and the working conditions were made worse by the fact that the tunnel was lit by gas lamps, which consumed oxygen and gave off carbon monoxide. The workforce was repeatedly struck by outbreaks of disease, including cholera in 1826, and the cost of pumping out the water became prohibitive.

In May 1827, the tunnel was flooded by a sudden inrush of water, and the work was suspended for several years while Brunel raised the additional capital needed to complete the work. On 12 January 1828, the partially completed tunnel was again flooded, and six workers were drowned. Brunel was himself nearly killed in the same incident, and was badly injured in rescuing some of the men. A grant of £246,000 from the Treasury in 1834 allowed the work to resume, with a more efficient pump, and the tunnel was finally holed through on 30 October 1841. The tunnel was completed and opened to the public on 25 March 1843, after 18 years of intermittent work, and it was 1,300 feet long, 14 feet wide, and 16 feet high, lined with two million bricks. The opening of the tunnel was a national event: Queen Victoria and Prince Albert visited the tunnel in person on 12 July 1843, and the Victorian Literature, Theatre, and the Written Word of the day described the occasion in detail.

The Tunnel as an Attraction

The Thames Tunnel was a triumph of engineering, but it was not an immediate commercial success. The tunnel had been designed to carry road traffic between the two banks, but the approach ramps were never built, and the tunnel was used only as a pedestrian tunnel, with a spiral staircase at each end. From 1843 onwards, the tunnel was a popular attraction, with a fair on the Rotherhithe side, a shooting gallery, a Tartar tent, and a barbershop, and the tunnel was known for a time as the “Tunnel Club” and the “Banqueting Hall of the People”. The tunnel was bought by the East London Railway Company in 1865, and the first trains ran through it on 7 December 1869, when the East London Line was opened to the public. The railway line was used by both passenger and goods trains for the rest of the Victorian period and for the next century.

The Afterlife of the Tunnel

The Thames Tunnel was the first of a long series of underwater tunnels. The Tower Subway, the first tube railway tunnel in the world, was built under the Thames in 1870 by James Henry Greathead using a smaller version of the Brunel shield, and it was the forerunner of the Victorian London Underground. The Blackwall Tunnel, a road tunnel, was built in 1897 by Peter Barlow and Alexander Binnie, the Greenwich Foot Tunnel was opened in 1902, and the Rotherhithe Tunnel, the Dartford Tunnel, and many other crossings have followed. The story of the underwater tunnel is part of the wider history of Transport in the Victorian Era.

The Thames Tunnel was the joint achievement of Marc Isambard Brunel and his son Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who served as the resident engineer on the project for several years before leaving in 1826 to pursue his own career. Marc Isambard Brunel, who was born in France in 1769, was already an established engineer when he took up the project, having built the machinery for the Royal Dockyard at Chatham and the first tunnel under the Thames. His son Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who was born in 1806, was to become the most famous engineer of the Victorian era, designing the Great Western Railway, the Clifton Suspension Bridge, the SS Great Britain, and the SS Great Eastern. The two Brunels are part of the wider history of the Victorian Engineering Marvels of the period, and the story of the Thames Tunnel is a central chapter in their story. The shield designed by Marc Brunel was the basis of the shields used to build the modern London Underground, the Channel Tunnel, the Hong Kong Cross-Harbour Tunnel, and many other modern tunnels, and the Thames Tunnel itself, now part of the Windrush Line of the London Overground, is still in daily use.