Awhile back, I wrote a series of
posts highlighting real locations suitable for a secret lair or dungeon crawl in
the heart of Victorian London. Here’s
another terrific subterranean space ready for an adventure.
The curves of the River Thames
slither through London cutting the metropolis in half. The river is an
essential waterway for shipping goods into the heart of Southern England.
Unfortunately in the early 1800s, transporting cargo the short distance between
London’s southern shore to the river Thames' northern shore was a chaotic mess.
Additional bridges would help move foot traffic but also add obstacles in the water,
worsening nautical congestion in the world's busiest port. To several
inventive dreamers, the solution was not to cross over the river, but beneath
it.
In 1821, the French expatriate engineer,
Marc Isambard Brunel, left a debtors-prison in Southwark London, after the
intervention of his influential patrons. They convinced the English government
to pay the inventor’s debts on the condition that he use his inventing genius
for England and not the Russian court. Brunel focused his keen but eccentric
mind on the problems of tunneling under the river Thames. Both Ralf Dodd’s previous attempt in 1798 and Robert
Vazie’s in 1802
ended disastrously when the excavations burrowed into banks of quicksand. Brunel
devised an excavation method which reinforced the tunnel walls while his
patented “tunnel shield” (an immensely heavy scaffold) braced the forward diggings
from collapse. In 1824, Brunel raised enough money to begin this monumental
project by selling shares in his Thames Tunnel Company for £50 each. He chose a
narrow point in the Thames between Rotherhithe in the south and Wapping in the
north. Construction started on March 2, 1825.
His crew began by assembling a
massive 50 ft wide iron ring and constructing a 40ft tall circular brick wall
atop the ring near the shore in Rotherhithe. As diggers removed the soil
beneath the 1,000-ton tower, its weight drove it into the ground, transforming
the tower into a shaft wall. When the ring reached its designated depth of 75
ft in January, the real terrors began.
A worker fell to his death down
the shaft that July. This tragedy opened a flood of disease, death, and
delirium plaguing the laborers in the tunnel. Work was hard and slow.
Thirty-six miners dug out the earth from behind the relative safety of the 80
ton tunneling shield as another team of bricklayers behind them lined the newly
exposed excavations with 2 feet of brick and concrete. Once they had excavated a uniform 4 ½ inches
across the shield’s face they pushed the mighty scaffold forward with jacks and
began again. Men worked in eight-hour shifts, often wading up to their knees in
brown and black river water tainted by
every possible pollutant of 19th century London. Natural gasses sifted up
through the ground, fouling the air and explosively igniting near open flames.
Temperatures under the river fluctuated horribly, swinging 30 degrees in an hour.
A host of maladies ranging from permanent blindness to diarrhea to nervous
collapse destroyed the miners or sent them to lunatic asylums. In 1828, a flood
halted all work on the tunnel with 549 feet finished. Although Brunel stopped
the flow by dropping bags of clay into the Thames over the leak, the Thames
Tunnel Company was now broke.
After seven years of lobbying,
the Thames Tunnel Company convinced the British government to loan them £246,000,
enough to build a new and improved tunnel shield and to finally reach Wapping’s
shore four years later. Laborer’s sunk a second shaft into the dirt of the
north shore. Thirteen months later, the Thames Tunnel Company completed the
Thames Tunnel.
The Thames Tunnel opened to the
public on March 25, 1843. Sightseers and
Londoners alike walked down its 1,300 feet length
for one penny a head toll and praised
it as “The Eighth Wonder of the World”. Brunel’s
wonder earned him a knighthood from Queen Victoria, but soon his glorious achievement decayed into the gloomy cesspool
known as the Hades Hotel.
Next week, we’ll look at the sad
decline of the Thames Tunnel in the 1850s and the strange life of its denizens.
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