Brunel's Tunnel, Rotherhithe to Wapping

The Thames at London was extremely congested. Up until the beginning of the nineteenth century, merchant ships coming into London could only be unloaded between the Tower of London and London Bridge. Sometimes ships were moored for three months on the river waiting for their cargoes to be unloaded. They were easy prey for gangs who cut them adrift and looted them when they ran aground.

Enclosed docks were needed. The first was opened in 1802 by the West India merchants at the northern end of the Isle of Dogs. Other enclosed docks soon followed: the London Docks at Wapping, the East India Docks at Blackwall and the Surrey Docks, all built in the first years of the nineteenth century.

But the nearest river crossing was London Bridge, by now very old and a few miles away from the new docks. An estimated 4,000 vehicles crossed the bridge every day, and 350 Thames watermen also took passengers across the river. Building a bridge this far to the East presented problems - the height of ships' masts meant that the bridge would have had to be very high and the approach roads very long.

The alternative was a tunnel, but the ground under the Thames was soft - gravel, sand and mud. It would not support a tunnel, especially with the weight of the water above. Robert Vazie first tried to build a tunnel in 1807, and the work was carried on by Richard Trevithick, a very capable engineer from Cornish tin mines, but it was flooded just less that 200 foot short of completion. Trevithick proposed a new method: putting cast iron sections into the tunnel excavated from above. This would have worked but it did not attract financial support. The tunnel was abandoned.

A new method was proposed by Brunel pere. His name was Marc Brunel, originally a French naval officer, he came to England to escape the French Revolution.  He went to America where he built a very impressive canal linking the Hudson River with Lake Champlain, so linking New York with the St. Lawrence River.

But in 1818 Marc Brunel patented a device for "forming drifts and tunnels underground". His inspiration was the shipworm, Teredo navalis, which bores into ships' timbers. Digging with the shell-like protrusions on either side of its head, the shipworm excretes the excavated wood out of its body, using it to line and reinforce the tunnel as it moves along.

 

 

 

They started with a shaft at the Rotherhithe end. Marc's new method was to build a brick tower and then simply allow it to sink into the soft riverbank through the downward force of its own weight. At first it appeared to be a tower - an inner and an outer surface of bricks a yard apart, the cavity between them filled with cement and rubble. A superstructure was then set on top of the tower on which a steam engine was assembled to pump away the water which the shaft encountered as it sank and to bring up buckets of earth from the bottom.

The structure weighed nearly 1,000 tons and sank into the ground at a rate of a few inches per day. The downwards progress of the shaft at Rotherhithe became one of the most popular and fashionable sights of London. After it was fully sunk diggers had to go down and give it a foundation and leave an opening for the tunnelling shield, and also dig a reservoir for water drained from the tunnel workings. Marc designed his own steam engine, installed above the shaft to drive the tunnel pumps and bring up the earth in buckets.

 

The shield was an iron frame facing the direction of the tunnel, rectangular. The miners worked in independent cells digging out a small patch at a time, while the frame was braced against the bricks the bricklayers had just finished laying, 6 deep lining the tunnel. Below you can see the miners working in the frame on the right and spoil being removed and bricks brought.

Finally the great shield was lowered into place 63 feet below the ground and the boring of the tunnel began. When fully manned, thirty six miners excavated a tunnel face of approx. 800 square foot. There were two eight hour shifts.

Marc had been taken ill even before the tunnelling got under way, and in 1826 the resident engineer also became ill and resigned. Isambard, Marc's son, had been involved in the work from the beginning. He often stayed below ground supervising the progress of the great shields for up to 36 hours at a time. In January 1827 his appointment as resident engineer was made official. He was only twenty years old.

Isambard was given three assistants, but all were prey to diseases because the river bed was composed of toxic substances, methane gas and foul water. One of the assistants died almost immediately. Workmen and overseers also fell ill. In February 1827, with 300 feet of the archway completed, the directors of the tunnel decided to allow the public to visit the work. Marc protested as the earth was inconsistent and gravel layers threatened the works with flooding. At the end of April up to 700 visitors were coming each day, for the charge of one shilling. The directors cut the workmen's wages which resulted in a strike.

Then there was a flood...
Marc had a stroke...
Another flood...
The tunnel was bricked up...

Today you can see the tunnel at Wapping station on the East London Railway, part of the Overground. You can't see any more of it because it is in use by trains. It is an International Landmark Site, one of only four in the country (and only 250 in the world). Here the Brunels pioneered a method of tunnelling used in every tube system all over the world ever since.

The museum at Rotherhithe tells all the story and you can go into the shaft, but they haven't much money with which to buy exhibits and they need funds to buy items like Brunel's drawings. Please visit and buy books and souvenirs.

Gloucester - give it a try

If I was in a position where I could move, I would move to Gloucester. It is small but smart. Regeneration has happened around the Historic docks area, and all the big warehouses are apartments (I think), there are lots of shops and cheap but nice eating places; everything is as clean as can be; there is a fabulous Cathedral and a very happy vibe. I say, "Go to Gloucester!" Surprisingly nice!

So we spent quite a bit of time there and in the end, never even saw the Art Gallery, because we decided to go up Crickley Hill (Iron Age Fort: what more could you want, and a fantastic view) and then find the source of the Thames. Well, we went to Kemble, where it's supposed to be, walked beside the little baby Thames (wide, shallow and very clean) for a mile or so and realised we were a long way from the actual marker, but figured we could go back to the car and drive to another road where we would be closer: we got to the pub called the Thames Head OK

 and couldn't park on the busy road, so we went further on to the path, we saw that the path went a long way up the field but we couldn't see the marker and then.... we realised we had to go home. So we never found it.

We were looking for this:

Wintry but dry

 Or this:

Probably more like this as it has been wet

But although there is a path it comes away from the stream (because of the wishes of landowners I think and it seems hard to find!

A Hard Day's Night

This is the first Beatles film, and I have seen it a number of times. It was on again this week so I had another look at it (it's only an hour and a half long) and I found it interesting enough to find out about it.

Fun with mirrors: John decides he doesn't look a bit like himself: and a great shot of a light reflector too!

I found out that the Beatles did not only suggest the director, Richard Lester, but also the writer. The director had made a short, goonish film with Spike Milligan called the Running, jumping and lying down film, and they liked the style, which is included in the sequence where the Beatles escape from the theatre down the fire escape and start running around a field. It is choreographed but seems like a game, has visual jokes based on confounding expectations. In this scene, Lester took John's place as John was off in London signing his book, In his own Write. After this the style was always included in the Monkees TV Series, which I was more familiar with BEFORE I saw this film, but the film was the origin of the style.

The Beatles also chose the writer, Alun Owen. The screenplay was written by Alun Owen, who was chosen because the Beatles were familiar with his play No Trams to Lime Street, and he had shown an aptitude for Liverpudlian dialogue. McCartney commented, "Alun hung around with us and was careful to try and put words in our mouths that he might've heard us speak, so I thought he did a very good script."^[6] Owen spent several days with the group, who told him their lives were like "a train and a room and a car and a room and a room and a room"; the character of Paul's grandfather refers to this in the dialogue.^[7] Owen wrote the script from the viewpoint that the Beatles had become prisoners of their own fame, their schedule of performances and studio work having become punishing. The screenplay was nominated for an Oscar.

Because the Beatles weren't actors, the script is full of one-liners. This makes the film fast and snappy too. However, although John and Paul don't seem to act, George has a scene with a marketing man who is trying to sell merchandise to teens in which he seems to remain his own man, and Ringo just seems to be enjoying himself - has a great scene chatting to a boy by the Thames in Twickenham (which every reviewer mistakes for a canal).

The writer seems to have noticed that John was the one with the bolshie personality; although it is Ringo who runs away it is John who has their manager saying "You're a swine, John Lennon" at the end of the movie. You notice that John looks older than the others: he looks as though he is just outgrowing the idea of a rock band in suits and ties, he is probably fed up with not being able to wear glasses - he was very short-sighted, he is happiest singing his own music but eventually he will take a dislike to the whole idea of show business. The wonder is that he stayed with it for so long.

The writer picked up on the fact that John and Paul had Irish ancestry - so he makes Paul's grandfather Irish and in a scene at the police station, the latter recites a list of crimes and tortures the English had practised on the Irish. It's within a Keystone Kops kind of scenario where the police ask if their arrestees want a cup of tea before they all go running around ineffectually, so it's like finding a hand grenade in a bag of tennis balls. If you want to be reminded of realpolitik it's right there. And there is also a scene right in front of a bombed out church - this is the early 60s and the UK was still too poor to deal with bomb sites - and every shop and pub in this film full of snapshots, indicates poverty and hand to mouth living. Men had authoritarian voices and barked orders, indicating that they had done national service and were used to hierarchy. This is how the country really was, and this is what the Beatles, and the rest of us, were escaping from.

There's more fun with mirrors in this scene.

An impossible shot

and more fun with mirrors here