The Greenwich Foot Tunnel is situated beneath the River Thames and connects Cutty Sark Gardens in the Royal Borough of Greenwich to the south, with Island Gardens in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets in the north. It is a listed building.
The tunnel replaced an unreliable ferry service to enable dock workers, living on the south side of the river, to get to and from the thriving docks and shipyards that operated in and around the area where the modern financial centre of Canary Wharf now stands. At their busiest London's docks employed over 100,000 people, landing goods from all over the world.
It was built following approval of the London County Council Bridges Committee, chaired by Mr Will Crooks (1852-1921) in 1898. Will Crooks was a working-class politician who once worked on the docks before a political career saw him become the local Member of Parliament.
The Royal Borough of Greenwich and the London Borough of Tower Hamlets are joint equal owners of the tunnel.
Dimensions and design
Over 15 metres below the Thames, the Foot Tunnel is 370 metres long, with an outside diameter of around 4 metres and 0.32 metres thick cast iron and concrete walls.
The wall linings are covered with 200,000 original glazed tiles, which are still in place today. The spiral staircase
at the deeper Greenwich end has 100 steps and there are 87 steps at the Island Gardens end.
Close to the northern end, the diameter is reduced to 2.6 metres for a short section as a result of repairs following bomb damage during the Second World War.
The Foot Tunnel was designed by the London County Council's Chief Engineer Sir Alexander Binnie (1839-1917) and built by civil engineering contractors John Cochrane & Co.
The tunnel was built by tunnellers digging through the chalk by hand. Work on the tunnel started in June 1899 and it was opened on 4 August 1902. Two years later the lifts were installed. The lifts were refurbished in 1992 and then completely replaced in 2012 when major renovation works on the tunnel were undertaken.
History of the old ferry and new Foot Tunnel
Before the opening of the tunnel, river crossings were made by a ferry service that originally opened to transport horses, sheep, cattle and carriages, that dates back to mediaeval times in one form or another.
In the 1600s it was known as the Potter's Ferry, running from Chapel Lane in the southern part of the Isle of Dogs. That ferry was used by the famous English writer Samuel Pepys to attend a wedding on the Isle of Dogs, during the time that he and many others evacuated to Greenwich during the great plague.
In the late 1880s the ferry stopped being used to transport animals and was replaced by a more reliable and faster steam ferry. However, that ferry service was at the mercy of weather conditions and the notorious London smog and could often be unreliable, causing the masses of workers significant inconvenience to their daily cross river journey. In its last years of operation, the ferry is said to have transported over 500 vehicles and 1,000 people a week.
Today, the Foot Tunnel is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Over one million journeys are made through the tunnel every year.
1902 Greenwich Foot Tunnel opened
1904 Lifts installed
1944 Foot tunnel damaged by a flying bomb
1994 Lifts refurbished
2011-14 Major refurbishment to Greenwich Foot Tunnel and lifts replaced
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