Tower Subway
Most of us know about the Dartford, Rotherhithe and Blackwall Tunnels, and many of us use the rather claustrophobic Greenwich foot tunnel which connects south London to the Isle of Dogs. But what about the Tower Subway, which had already closed by the time the others were up and running? Designed and built in 1869 by PW Barlow and James Henry Greathead, using a wrought-iron tunnelling shield of their own design, it was only the world’s second underwater tunnel (Brunel had won that crown with his Thames Tunnel, now home to the East London Line).
Greathead and Barlow’s tunnel is, today, the only privately owned tunnel under the River Thames and, more surprisingly, it’s back in use. The only above-ground evidence is a little, circular brick tower sitting by the public entrance to the Tower of London (although this looks convincingly old it is in fact a later addition, from the 1920s). This conceals the original staircase, spiralling down into the Thames mud.
The tunnel was conceived as a route for a passenger railway service under the Thames, though it was to get into immediate difficulties, the conditions being impossibly cramped. This was the world’s first underground tube railway - although the Metropolitan Railway (now the Metropolitan Line) had begun six years before, that was a ‘cut and cover’ line, rather than a genuine tube. The entrance shaft at Tower Hill was to drop 60 feet, its twin at Vine Lane on the south bank was 50 feet deep, while the minimum distance between tunnel and water was 22 feet. The little cable car (which the railway company dubbed an ‘omnibus’) would shuttle a dozen people back and forth through a single-bore 450 yard tunnel, 7 feet in diameter, on a 2.5ft track, all powered by a tiny four horsepower steam engine, stationed at the south end of the tunnel - the journey was to take just 70 seconds.
Barlow and Greathead’s men made astonishing progress, tunnelling 4.5 feet each day, and completing the job in just ten months. En route, they discovered some lost London, unearthing a bag of 300 silver coins from the reign of Henry VIII. Sadly the pair had to hand the booty over to the Crown as treasure trove - and their bad luck wouldn’t stop there. Their tube, building on the recent tunnel-shield technology invented by Brunel, was revolutionary in many ways. It came in on deadline, was cheap (only £16,000 to build compared to the £614,000 spent on the Thames Tunnel at Wapping) and Barlow had done his sums very carefully. He worked out that by charging a penny a trip (tuppence for first class), the world’s first tube line would soon be in profit.
Unfortunately, people just didn’t like it. Charles Dickens, in his Dictionary of London in 1879, wrote that ‘There is not much head-room left, and it is not advisable for any but the very briefest of Her Majesty’s lieges to attempt the passage in high-heeled boots, or with a hat to which he attaches any particular value.’
Italian writer Edmondo De Amicis was rather more florid in his descriptions: ‘I disappeared from the world indeed, going down a lighted spiral staircase which buries itself in the earth on the right bank of the Thames, opposite the Tower. I went down and down between two dingy walls until I found myself at the round opening of the gigantic iron tube, which seems to undulate like a great intestine in the enormous belly of the river.’
Edmondo composed himself before pausing to reflect that ‘in the water beneath, in the obscure depths of the river, is where suicides meet death, and that over your head vessels are passing, and that if a crack should open in the wall you would not even have the time to recommend your soul to God, in that moment how lovely seems the sun’. These were probably not quotes Barlow would have chosen for his advertising material.
And if Londoners were slightly more phlegmatic than De Amicis, they didn’t really take to it. Within three months it was shut and was converted to a foot tunnel, with gas lights overhead. It caught on, too, with 20,000 people a week using it, but it was eventually to be done for by a new marvel … Tower Bridge opened in 1894 and killed it off.
The tunnel was bought by the London Hydraulic Power Company who, rather marvellously, used a hidden network of nearly 200 miles of pipes to channel power around London, to raise theatre safety curtains, cranes, lifts and so on. Today, with the adaptability typical of so much of old London, the subway is still in use … as a conduit for cable television lines.